


Luminous Beings Are We

by luninosity



Category: British Actor RPF, X-Men: First Class (2011) RPF
Genre: Allergies, Alternate Universe - Star Wars Fusion, But James Is An Unusual Apprentice, Commitment, Conversations, Couch Cuddles, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Empathy, Falling In Love, First Kiss, First Meetings, Fluff and Crack, Ghosts, Hand Jobs, Happy Ending, Heroic Rescues, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Jedi, Love Confessions, M/M, Ordeals, Politics, Press and Tabloids, Relationship Negotiation, Sexual Content, Teacher-Student Relationship, True Love, feelings are hard, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-01-24 22:57:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 41,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1619999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luninosity/pseuds/luninosity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Star Wars fusion, more or less, in which Jedi Knight Michael Fassbender gets a new apprentice with extremely distracting beautiful blue eyes…</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. here's where the fun begins

**Author's Note:**

> The fault of [this interview,](http://fassyforever.tumblr.com/post/85233272534/helens78-xmendaily-michael-fassbender-and) in which Michael wanted to be Yoda, and James concluded he’d be a “bi-curious Jedi”. 
> 
> Title and chapter titles all courtesy of Star Wars, of course! 
> 
> Note: I haven't read my Expanded Universe novels in years, and even then they're all Timothy Zahn glory days era, but this is some sort of fusion with our future universe anyway, so we'll just handwave my failures of up-to-date Star Wars knowledge, perhaps? :-)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michael meets his new apprentice.

“We need you to mentor the new trainee,” Patrick said. He was wearing, as usual, Ian’s robes. This magically did not detract from the wise and learned Jedi Master persona in any way. “We think you’ll get on marvelously with him.”  
  
“I don’t do individual trainees,” Michael said, and levitated Ian’s spiced-chocolate mug away from the table just to underscore the point. Patrick sighed; Ian, however, looked delighted.  
  
Not the intended effect, though Michael should’ve guessed as much. Both current Academy headmasters—and brilliant legendary Jedi Grand Masters—actually liked him, and hence paid a great deal of attention to the unfolding of his life. Michael was beginning to feel like a trained fluffy Alderaanian pittin jumping through hoops, and had said so once. They’d laughed and patted him on both shoulders, in flawless synchronization.  
  
“And I’m not the most qualified. I’ve never even, y’know, asked for an apprentice. I’m only a year out of the Academy myself. And I _don’t_ do trainees.”  
  
“Yes, you’ve said, why is that?” Ian was also wearing his own robes, but Patrick’s belt. Opinions around the Academy varied as to whether this was five-hundred-year-old absentmindedness, adorable public displays of affection, or simply the fact that after three centuries together both Grand Masters just thought of themselves as one person with two lightsabers. They also had a knack for asking precisely the question their target least wanted to hear.  
  
Michael stared at the table, and his untouched eggs. It had been a nice breakfast. The Academy instructors’ dining hall had elegant Bakuran woodwork and wide calming windows with views of the clouds, probably designed by some long-ago Master to encourage peacefulness when dealing with students.  
  
He wondered whether he could throw himself out of one. Ian’d likely catch him mid-fall.  
  
“I just don’t,” he said, to the eggs. They looked back sympathetically, particularly after Patrick stole his toast. “I just…I don’t know. Never mind. Go away and let me terrorize young minds in peace.”  
  
He was in fact one of the more popular Jedi Knights currently serving as Academy instructors. Being a recent graduate himself tended to help, as did the fact that he’d acquired a reputation for patience and commitment and enthusiasm about working with every single student. Michael regarded this unanticipated popularity with some bemusement. He’d never quite expected love notes stuck to his door, or sketches of himself with a shark-tiger grin appearing attached to written assignments.  
  
‘Is this about Steve?”  
  
Ah. Ian would ask that.  
  
“No.” He took the spiced chocolate away again. “Nothing’s about Steve.”  
  
This had the benefit of being mostly true. Half his fellow Jedi Knights assumed he’d been sleeping with Steve since the day his mentor’d smiled at him across the bar in his parents’ upscale Eirean cantina. They also assumed Michael’d been heartbroken since the first time Steve had left for another soon-to-be-successful recruitment mission, robes swirling majestically.  
  
The truth was more, and less, complicated, of course. Michael’d never slept with Steve. Would’ve been like sleeping with the older brother he’d never had, with the one man who’d ever looked at him and seen more than a cantina-owner’s son and bartender in the making. Steve had leaned in and smiled like a supernova and said _I know what you’re capable of,_ and the galaxy’d trembled with horizons opening wide.  
  
He wasn’t heartbroken. He knew Steve had a duty that wasn’t any part of his own. He did love Steve, always would, but not that way.  
  
He wasn’t lonely, precisely. He did like teaching. Liked the moments of watching students truly _understand_ , seeing connections they’d never seen before. He was only…  
  
…adrift. Waiting. And he didn’t know why. The tug of the Force inside his bones, the sense of ineffable _rightness_ that’d led him through the Academy years, had gone silent lately. Prophecy and far-seeing’d never been his strong suits, and now they seemed to be gone altogether. He’d always thought he’d know where to go, what to do, once he’d at last stood up and been called a Jedi Knight.  
  
He did like teaching. But he couldn’t take on an apprentice. Not when he couldn’t figure out what he himself might be waiting _for_.  
  
So he’d accepted the instructor’s post when offered it, and lived with the odd hollow unanchored feeling in his chest, where his heart lurked alone behind its shield.  
  
“I don’t do trainees,” he tried again, just in case.  
  
“Well, perhaps not,” Patrick said, eyes smiling ever so slightly, and picked up Michael’s second piece of toast. “You will like this one, however.” And the words rang out like a prophecy themselves, in that serenely magisterial tone.  
  
Ian recaptured the floating mug with a single finger-twitch, on Michael’s other side. “His name’s James. Hugh found him being an actor, of all things. Historical holodramas. Quite good really, if you’ve seen him in any—”  
  
“I haven’t.”  
  
“You don’t even know his last name. Hugh swears, hand over heart, that he’s got empathic and emotional manipulation talents beyond any of our current charts, isn’t that wonderful?”  
  
“No. What was Hugh even doing in the Hollywood Nebula?”  
  
“Running an errand for us. Hush. This is the extremely interesting bit. He’s even older than you were when you arrived. Only two years younger than you are now, in fact.”  
  
“That…shouldn’t be possible.” He didn’t want to be intrigued. Refused to be. “How’d no one find him until now? Especially if he’s sort of famous?”  
  
“He’s not that famous,” Ian observed. “Yet.”  
  
“Concealment,” Patrick said, and eyed Michael’s plate. All the toast was gone. “The boy has a self-effacement shield that frankly you wouldn’t believe. He really is quite good with emotion.”  
  
“So…you want to give me a too-old apprentice with self-esteem issues who’s used to a celebrity lifestyle?” Michael glanced at the window again. Too far away. Most likely.  
  
“Not precisely.” Ian patted his hand. “I’ve got a good feeling about this.”  
  
“I don’t,” Michael said. “I’ve got, y’know, the exact opposite of a good feeling about this. A not-good feeling about this, in fact.”  
  
“You’ll be fine. It’s only for a few months, and not even an official appointment; we know you’re happy teaching, of course, and he won’t have much growing-up to do, after all. We’ve put him in your morning class just for some technical catch-up, and he’ll get Order history in the afternoons—don’t worry about that—”  
  
“Oh, _thank_ you.”  
  
“—and some private work with Patrick to hone those particular gifts.” Ian’s expression, gazing at his partner, practically glowed with fondness. “He’s so good with bringing out the best in people, isn’t he…”  
  
“Yes,” Michael said, and pushed his eggs in Patrick’s direction. They might as well get eaten by someone. “You two are terrifyingly in love and otherwise kind of all-over terrifying, you know that, right?”  
  
“Now, darling.” Ian put an arm around his shoulders. “You adore us.”  
  
“I’ve offended the Force somehow, haven’t I? Or just you?”  
  
“He’ll be here this afternoon.” Ian beamed at him, avuncular and unstoppable as an avalanche. “By the way, don’t you have to teach this morning?”  
  
Michael snapped his head up, swore at the chronometer on the wall, tripped over his robes, and ran. And for the next few hours, forgot to think about his new apprentice and the myriad looming problems thereof, in favor of explaining yet again to teenage younglings why a good working knowledge of landspeeder engines was, in fact, necessary for their Jedi education.  
  
Some previous Academy head, aeons ago, had determined that all Jedi needed at least the basics of ship mechanics and technical skill. Michael approved. For one, these things were handy; besides, while Force manipulation and telekinesis could go a long way, without a knowledge of which components went where, one’s courier ship might be stuck on Dagobah forever. And a Jedi who could fix her own planethopper commanded more respect, generally speaking, than one who couldn’t.  
  
Anyway, Michael _liked_ playing with engines. Sheer fun.  
  
His new apprentice, being an actor, had likely never seen the inside of an engine. Michael resisted the urge to roll his eyes. On top of everything else, he was hungry, because Patrick’d eaten all the eggs.  
  
Mind over physicality, he thought. Discipline. Control.  
  
He would’ve settled for the toast. Or Ian’s spiced chocolate.  
  
One of his students managed to explode a fuel cell. Everyone ducked. Michael caught the debris with a hand-wave, checked the kid for injuries, informed him that emotions did sometimes have consequences when one broadcast them loudly enough, and then wondered how much of the accident’d been his own fault.  
  
Eventually the afternoon arrived. Michael, in the library because he wasn’t sure where else one met a new temporary apprentice, hovered around a rack of antique lightsaber schematics, and struggled with the basic question of how to say hello.  
  
As it turned out, the struggle was unnecessary. Because his apprentice was late.  
  
Hours late. Not merely minutes.  
  
Michael glared at the lightsaber schematics, as even the artificial light got dimmer. Late afternoon. Followed by evening. The glitter of Coruscant’s endless-city radiance outside.  
  
Ian tapped very politely at his brain. _Michael?_  
  
 _I hate you and your nerf-herder apprentice_ , Michael snarled back, which was not how one should talk to one’s Grand Master or Academy headmaster, but he was hungry, and he was annoyed. _Is he even coming?_  
  
 _Yes, sorry, he got delayed, some sort of technical…thing, you’d know better than I would…involving his ship. You’ll meet him tomorrow. Go and have an Ithorian brandy and try not to seethe. Hatred leads to the Dark Side, dear boy, and you’re giving me a headache._  
  
Michael turned his frustration up to full-static, pushed it through, and then added _sorry,_ because it wasn’t Ian’s fault his apprentice was evidently an inconsiderate child. Ian sent back a shrug— _it’s fine, don’t worry, we’re fine_ —and then got distracted by the comfort of Patrick’s lips, which Michael did not need to see and which led to a hasty severing of mental connection.  
  
Michael looked at the ceiling, the sparkling cityscape window, the lightsaber display, the floor, and finally the door. Sighed again. Went out to find food, and to change into trousers and leave his formal robes in a heap beside the hamper, and to vanish into the garage and tinker with his baby T-64 skyhopper for a while.  
  
The garage should’ve been quiet. Should’ve been deserted, this time of night. Certainly this maintenance area, anyway. Hushed, peaceful, simply himself and the world of voiceless metal and equipment.  
  
There should not have been an antique THX-1138 light freighter half-dismantled in the left bay, or the muted grumbles of a richly accented voice providing cheerful commentary from beneath it.  
  
Michael stopped. Worked on processing the apparition for a minute. He was pretty sure his hangar bay hadn’t just turned into a site for unrequested dream visions, but there was always the remote possibility.  
  
The freighter was _gorgeous_. A bit beaten-up and in need of repair, but with beautiful lines, built for pure rugged strength and generosity. She’d run her heart out for her owner, if asked, and she carried her dents with pride. Michael resisted the urge to whistle in appreciation. Jedi weren’t covetous. Honestly.  
  
There was also a pair of long legs sticking out of an access panel, casually unaware of any audience and clothed in skintight trousers that outlined muscular masculine thighs. Michael, entranced, inched closer.  
  
Maybe Jedi _were_ covetous. Because he was definitely coveting. The ship. And the thighs. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had such an instantaneous onslaught of lust.  
  
He was close enough to hear the voice, now. New Glasgow accent, lush and textured as ruffled plaid, and just as warm. Carrying on a conversation with one of the Academy’s helpful astromech droids, because the owner of the accent clearly would either talk to anything or considered astromechs to be as worthy of chattering at as anything else.  
  
“…so the smuggler said, I like the way you handle a blaster, right, and she said—oh, how’d you know I needed that hydrospanner, lovely, thank you—anyway, guess what she said?” The astromech chirped happily.  
  
Michael, who couldn’t not, said, “Don’t shoot first,” because it was the punchline of an exceedingly dirty joke he’d not heard in years.  
  
The legs went still. Some rustling ensued. And then rumpled hair and a hint of ginger stubble and grease-smudged freckles and the bluest eyes in every known universe popped into view.  
  
Michael forgot how to breathe.  
  
The blue eyes danced at him. “She said, keep your safety on, ’s the way I heard it. And Gran told me Jedi didn’t have a sense of humor. Let’s not tell her she’s wrong, or we’ll both be in trouble. Hi, by the way, James McAvoy, and this is Charlie. Well, technically, her name’s _Lady Charlotte Xavier of Westchester_. But Charlie to you.”  
  
The blue eyes had named their ship after a children’s adventure-story heroine. Of course they had. And offered the name, freely shared, with an affectionate pat to the hull.  
  
The pat was followed by a sinuous slither out of the hatch, over the wing, and down to the floor. A snapshot at any given second could’ve been a pin-up at every dive bar or cantina in the universe, and not for exclusively human clientele.  
  
Michael’s mouth had gone absolutely dry. Too many sturdy muscles, too much sapphire kindness, that sense of humor, and, oh seven hells of Abeloth, the shortness. James would fit perfectly under his arm. In his arms. Aligned beneath him, or atop him, in bed.  
  
…James. Arriving today. With ship trouble. His apprentice should be named James. And arriving late. With ship trouble.  
  
He did have one word left in his head. It was: fuck.  
  
James lifted an eyebrow at him. “I don’t suppose you could tell me where to find a Jedi Knight named Michael Fassbender, could you? I think I ought to apologize for being late, I did try to let people know—I’m not good at finding specific unfamiliar minds yet, but I have met Ian, so I just kind of shouted that way earlier, and he heard me—sorry, sorry, not important. I suppose he’s already in bed, anyway, and I should apologize in the morning, but just in case not, would you have any idea?”  
  
Michael blinked. Lost in the torrent of sentences. Lost in the blue.  
  
James attempted to rub grease from one cheekbone. Because his fingertips were also dirty, this endeavor was doomed to failure. The effort only streaked iridescent shine across effervescent freckles and pale skin, making him look fantastical, imaginary, filthy, decadent. Michael opted not to try to talk. Afraid he’d only whimper.  
  
James regarded his fingers hopelessly. “Maybe you’re right, I should shower first. I mean, I’m not exactly impressive even when I’m not covered in failing hyperdrive. Not Charlie’s fault, of course. Either part. I don’t know, do you know him, would he appreciate cleanliness or timeliness more, d’you think?”  
  
Michael, intelligently, managed, “Um.”  
  
“Oh—” Swift distress, surfacing in twin sapphires. More shocking for how readily it came: apprehension and apology. “Were you coming down to ask me to move? Should I not be parked here? I’m really sorry, Ian said anywhere and I just—or should I not’ve borrowed a droid—thanks, Arfour—” This got a welcoming squeal in reply. “—but I couldn’t leave that stabilizer broken, I’m sorry, I can move if—”  
  
“No. Um. You’re fine. Your…Charlie…is fine.” The eyes. Too distracting. Too genuine. An odd hum and spark under his skin. The Force, finally telling him something? Or only the heat of supernova blue? “I’m…sort of…Michael. Hi.”  
  
James stared at him in complete and utter horror, put a wild hand over the grease on his cheek, and said, “Oh, fuck me.”  
  
Michael very nearly let the _yes please_ escape. Bit his tongue. Literally. It hurt. Another part of him winced in sympathy, though for which of them he wasn’t sure. The rest of him pulled itself together enough to say, “Probably not part of your curriculum…”  
  
“Oh fuck,” James said again, “I’m so sorry,” and his eyes were huge and unhappy and bluer than the edges of the universe curving into infinity; Michael could feel that gaze in his heart, tugging at his soul, and he wanted to cry if James were crying, wanted to do anything to make him smile again—  
  
“Stop. That.” Off-the-charts empathy, indeed. Hells. All seven of them. And more.  
  
James actually clapped a hand over his mouth, a gesture Michael’d never seen anyone make in real life. Through fingers, mourned, “Not on purpose, I swear, I’m so sorry, that’s why I’m here, though, I can’t not—Gran tried to help but it just sort of leaks—I didn’t think it’d even work on proper Jedi, you must have shields and—oh fuck I’m sorry.”  
  
Michael did, as it happened, have mental shields. Good ones. Well-honed.  
  
No wonder Patrick and Ian wanted those talents here, under supervision. James could conquer the known galaxies. Not even trying.  
  
“It’s…fine. We’re going to have to work on your control. In the morning.”  
  
“Yes, sir. Is that right? Sir, I mean. Master.” James still sounded unhappy. Something nameless in Michael’s chest twinged. Not even external influence this time. Damn.  
  
Also, definitely not _Master_. Not in that voice. Not with those eyes. He wasn’t certain he could even handle James calling him _sir_.  
  
“Um. Whatever’s…comfortable. I’m just a Jedi Knight, not technically a—oh, damn. I suppose I am.” He _did_ have an apprentice, now. “You could even sort of call me Michael. I mean, we’re the same age.”  
  
“We’re not, in fact.” James tipped that head to one side. The smile was resurfacing, now that Michael didn’t seem upset. “You’re two years older than I am. I did do some research. All the Academy instructors have bios on the net. I was curious.”  
  
Somehow Michael wasn’t at all surprised. He’d’ve done the same. Except he hadn’t, not really, because he’d not wanted to think about the fact that his apprentice was a holovid actor, and so had pointedly _not_ watched any of the films during the course of the wasted afternoon.  
  
This was, he was willing to admit on the spot, an error. He’d watch James in anything. Hello there, covetousness.  
  
Charlie smirked at him from her maintenance bay. Even the astromech droid was grinning.  
  
“Right,” he said, mostly for something to say. “So. Um. Michael, if you want, or whatever you want to be more formal…I don’t, y’know, care…”  
  
“But other Masters might?” Complete comprehension; and behind that a kind of playfully serious laughter. We’re sharing the joke, said the eyes, because we know it might be true. “Yes, sir. In public.”  
  
“…right. So, um, you’ve sort of…had a long day…and you’re in my morning class tomorrow, anyway, we can talk after that…” And Michael could escape before James called him _sir_ one more time. “Oh—um, room assignments, do you need help finding yours? Or anything?”  
  
“Ian gave me a number, and an access code. I can find it.” Self-reliant, beautiful, a flicker of too-quick affirmation. Michael wanted to touch him. To kiss him. To pretend there’d been a mix-up about rooms so that James, as his apprentice, could come and stay in his.  
  
James _was_ his apprentice. Fuck.  
  
James was also a natural empath. And even if that didn’t extend to proper telepathy, Michael still shouldn’t be having those thoughts. Should be lightyears away from having those thoughts.  
  
Jedi weren’t ruled by base undignified passions. That was a given. Understood.  
  
Whoever was doing the understanding had obviously never met James. Had never seen him swing powerful arms above his head, stretching, yawning, unconsciously lazily sensual. Oh, _fuck_.  
  
He gave James his personal comlink code. Because that was rational. Logical. James might need him. James might have questions.  
  
James might have trouble with the bed. Or his too-tight trousers. Could happen.  
  
“Thank you.” James called him, briefly, from an unobtrusively expensive wrist link. Just long enough for Michael to get his number in return. “Bed, then?”  
  
Michael glanced at his own skyhopper, sitting to the side. Mentally apologized. “I’ll share the lift with you. Tenth level. If you don’t mind. You’re the fifth, with that room number.”  
  
“Oh, by all means, I like sharing lifts with people.” James’s smile didn’t only flirt with the double entendre. Bought it a drink, too, and took it home for the night. “You?”  
  
“…what?”  
  
“I know you’re allowed. Ian—sorry, Master McKellen, that should be—has Patrick. I could tell they were busy when I shouted, earlier. Sometimes it’s…hard…not to overhear. And to get the side effects. Anyway, do you? Share lifts often?”  
  
“That’s not even a good euphemism!” The only other option was to kiss James senseless on the spot. No. Not even a little bit senseless. No. “And no. No, I don’t. Ian and Patrick are…special. Very. Most of us don’t. It’s just. Duty. Commitment. No room for…that. And this is the most inappropriate conversation I’ve ever had with an apprentice.”  
  
“You’ve only ever had one apprentice. I did look you up.”  
  
“With _anyone’s_ apprentice.”  
  
“Ah, well, just thought I’d ask.” James leaned a shoulder against the metal of the lift’s wall. The lift appeared perfectly pleased to embrace the shoulder. Michael was unreasonably jealous of architecture. “You seem tense.”  
  
“I’m not tense.” The whole conversation—the whole night—had veered into absurdism anyway. Maybe this was how first encounters of first apprentices with reluctant Masters always went. Or it was just James, and those disconcertingly expressive eyes. “I’m happy.”  
  
“Right,” James noted, eyebrows up, “didn’t anyone teach you not to lie to an empath? My gran would’ve smacked me with a shoe. Sir.”  
  
“The first thing I’m teaching you, then, is don’t read people without permission, James.” He’d meant that to sound more stern. Annoyed. The words somehow came out almost flirtatious. Derailed by the _sir_.  
  
“I can try,” James said, and gazed at him speculatively. “I can’t always shut it off. This is my floor. Michael.”  
  
And that was, if possible, worse. Michael stood there imagining all the ways in which James might ever say his name, while the lift-doors closed.  
  
And then he stuck a hand between them, making servos whine in protest. “James?”  
  
James turned, only a few steps down the corridor. In the night-shadows, he stood out like a buried treasure, dark hair and sapphire eyes and fire-freckled skin. “Yes, sir?”  
  
“You said your grandmother tried to teach you. Is she some kind of Force-sensitive? Fallanassi adept?” There were still a few around, practicing non-interference as best they could in an increasingly cluttered universe; it wasn’t out of the question. And he might recognize the name. He did need to know what James already knew, if anything needed to be built on or unlearned.  
  
“Oh…well, she tried, I was stronger than she was, though, and it got…dangerous…” James glanced away. At the shadows. “I learned to hide, mostly, after that. Hardly a preferable long-term solution, but she doesn’t trust the Jedi much. No offense.”  
  
“No, of course not.” The histories weren’t spotless. Extremely spotted, in fact. With red. These days, this century and the previous, were better. But the star systems had long memories. “So…would I know her?”  
  
“Ah. Maybe.” James bit his lower lip, released it. Said a name.  
  
 _“Your grandmother is a Nightsister of Dathomir?!”_  
  
“She never even killed anyone!” Instantly protective. Fierce. Loyal as burning suns. “That’s why she left, she didn’t want to hurt travelers who’d only just got lost, she didn’t—she ended up in New Glasgow when her ship broke down and my granddad fixed it for her and by then she didn’t want to leave, they’ve been there since, and they were the best parents any kid could hope for after— Anything else you want to know, sir?”  
  
Michael made a desperate sound. Certainly wasn’t a word. Someplace between _oh hells_ and _no that about covers it_ and _please fuck me now while you look at me with those eyes_. Fortunately he’d put that extra effort into his shields.  
  
“Okay, then.” James ran a hand through his hair, rumpling it more, deflating slightly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to blow up at you. I thought you already knew, Ian knows, and I just…”  
  
“You love her,” Michael said, because he could see it, could hear it, could feel it ribboning out around them in every word and every breath. And James’s expression eased, watching his.  
  
“I do.”  
  
“I was just sort of surprised.”  
  
“I could tell.” A little wryly, that, with a crooked smile. “I’d still share a lift with you, if you’d not mind sharing one with me. Witch’s grandson and all.”  
  
“Well,” Michael said, “you did say she never killed anyone,” and James’s eyes danced hesitantly amid the shadows.  
  
“Neither’ve I. In case you were wondering. That was still a euphemism, by the way.”  
  
“I feel inexplicably safer knowing that about you. No.”  
  
“Really? Because you were thinking some things about my backside in the hangar bay, sir, and I could—”  
  
“You—that—I’m your—that’s not appropriate, James!”  
  
“Oh, I know, I won’t mention it in public.” Teasing, but complicatedly so. Serious about the offer and about the promise of public propriety. Pulling honest flirtation and cheerful desire into view like armor, hiding the deeper emotions that’d just been on display. “Gran did say Jedi never have any fun, which sounds to me like a complete waste of fascinating telekinetic abilities, and also, by the way, you didn’t say no.”  
  
“Oh fuck,” Michael said, out loud this time, as the lift doors yelled at him for keeping them apart.  
  
“This seems to be me,” James said, and pointed at a door-plate. “Night, sir.”  
  
Michael let the lift doors thump shut, which they did with a relieved little sigh. Slumped against the wall, the same one James’d been leaning on earlier. Put his face in his hands.  
  
His apprentice was a terrible influence. On his vocabulary. On his dignity. On his body, which thought that following James out of the lift and doing unspeakable things to that aforementioned backside would be a spectacular idea. There had to be _some_ dark influence at work there.  
  
Maybe that came with the Nightsister inheritance. Otherworldly attractiveness, like an incubus from Old Earth legends. The ability to light up Michael’s whole body, at one glance, with instantaneous and near-painful arousal.  
  
He peeled himself off the wall and wandered out of the lift and down the hall to his room. Let himself fall onto the bed, completely dressed, kicking off his boots. He liked his bed. It wasn’t confusing or bewilderingly complexly lovely or accidentally too good at sneaking private emotions out of his head. It fluffed up around him with familiar camaraderie.  
  
He’d be seeing James tomorrow morning. In class. And after. He’d be seeing a lot of James. All those complexities, all those layers like metallic puzzle-balls, intricately carved and multifaceted and satiny to the touch. James might smile again if Michael touched him, not for sex—as much as they’d both want to say yes—but simply to touch him, to banish that edge of startling wistful loneliness behind the blue.  
  
Michael lay there looking at the fine white curves of his ceiling, thinking: James. James, in the morning. And he couldn’t help picturing that smile.  
  
And that odd little thrill came back and skittered down his bones. It didn’t feel like fretfulness or uncertainty. It felt bright and clear, like anticipation.


	2. you do have your moments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which it is the first day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, there are now five chapters. Are you surprised? Is anyone? :-)

Tomorrow. Morning. The sun sent timely rays in to pour around the closed window-shutters. Michael, lying in bed, played with gilded dust-specks for a few seconds, levitating them, spinning them around, just being happy. He did like mornings. Always had enjoyed the moments of clarity, of gold-washed stillness, serenity while the world spun on.   
  
This morning felt brighter than usual somehow. A sense of completion, of rightness, in the air. Like the world’d spun into precisely the hoped-for place.   
  
Like a joke with a perfect punchline. Like a question and an answer. Like blue eyes, sea-glass and summer-sky.   
  
Like…   
  
…James.    
  
Oh. Fuck.   
  
Michael sat up, sat there helplessly flailing for a minute, and then flung mental pebbles at Patrick’s shields until he got a sleepy-morning cuddle-infused wordless question.   
  
_ You gave me a witch’s grandson as an apprentice!  _ Michael yelled.   
  
Patrick yawned. _Good morning to you, too. I believe they properly go by Nightsisters—_   
  
_ They call THEMSELVES witches! They’re proud of it! Did he bring a pet rancor, too? _   
  
_ Now, dear boy, we didn’t think you of all people would be prejudiced. _ Ah. Ian was up too. No surprise, considering the Academy Heads were essentially one Head. Michael threw dust-specks at the ceiling in exasperation.   
  
_ I’m not, you KNOW I’m not, I just—I would’ve appreciated some warning! _ Before he’d inadvertently insulted James. Before he’d caught the weary wary closing-of-ranks behind all the blue. He thought James had forgiven him—if nothing else, James knew he’d not meant it, empathy was good for that much—but the whole disastrous first meeting could’ve gone infinitely better if he’d just _known._   
  
_ We didn’t expect you to trip over him in the hangar bay, you understand,  _ Patrick observed. _We’re not infallible. Though now that you have, what do you think?_   
  
Beautiful. Unconsciously sensual, in every movement. Loyal. Passionate. Powerful. Untrained. Astonishing. Michael said, _he’s going to be trouble._   
  
_ Ah, but that’s your job, young Master.  _   
  
_ We’ll be interested to watch. _   
  
Michael scowled at the ceiling. Wondered how much effort it’d take to levitate his Heads’ bed off the floor from his current distance.   
  
_ Oh, do try, we could— _   
  
_ No no no no, never mind, entirely no! What do you want me to do with him? He’s hardly a youngling, I can’t expect him to be comfortable with— _   
  
_ Do what occurs to you, my dear. We trust your instincts. He’s already of age; we can dispense with most of the general curriculum. We imagine he’ll be out of the Academy in a matter of months, assuming we can get a handle on his particular talents, so you needn’t worry. _   
  
Somehow that thought didn’t sit right in his gut. James graduating. Leaving. Off on some diplomatic mission, arranging peace treaties, bringing two warring sides to accord with only the power of his smile. That smile could do it, too.    
  
James wouldn’t be here. No Charlie in the hangar bay. No terrible jokes about handling weapons. No shared lifts and unblushingly straightforward innuendo.   
  
And that shouldn’t matter, not at all. He’d only met James the night before. Only one encounter.   
  
His heart, unbidden, performed a wistful skip and spin. The dust-mites tumbled to the ground.   
  
Patrick and Ian were either preoccupied or being tactfully silent. After a while, Michael said _, I should go. Class._   
  
_ Go on. Send James up to see Patrick after lunch, if you would? If this works for his schedule we’d like to start immediately, considering that he’s currently putting everyone on the fifth floor in an excellent mood while in the shower— _   
  
_ Love, _ Patrick interjected, _you may wish to reconsider that phrasing._   
  
_ Oh! Sorry, no, not like that—not that we can tell—he just seems to quite like having a proper shower, not that sonic monstrosity aboard his ship. Er. Apologies. _   
  
Michael, faced with the mental image of James and all those short sturdy muscles water-drenched and glistening, enjoying themselves in every conceivable way, bit back a whimper.   
  
_ In any case, you’ll think of something. Trust the Force. Let yourself listen. We really do feel that…this is the best option. For both of you. _   
  
For both of them? _Wait, what does that mean—?_   
  
_ Go and have caffeine and for goodness’ sake don’t ask him about pet rancors,  _ Patrick said, mostly teasing, and then shut off the channel, polite yet incontrovertible.   
  
Michael looked from the ceiling to the floor to the door of his refresher unit. Sink, toilet, shower. Shower. James. Shower. No one would _know,_ right?   
  
Twenty minutes later, he was clean and half-dressed and slightly weak-kneed from the best orgasm of his entire life and only feeling a tiny bit guilty. James had practically offered to relieve his tension right there in the lift, the previous night, anyway. James wouldn’t mind.    
  
And it wasn’t as if Michael was planning to _do_ anything about it. That would be…wrong. Unethical. Taking advantage of his apprentice.   
  
…his very willing apprentice. Who might enjoy being taken advantage of. Who might gaze up at him with those endless eyes and call him sir again and beg prettily to be allowed to come if Michael permitted it, and oh hells it would be so wrong and dark and filthy and shamefully good—   
  
He ended up in the shower again. _So_ wrong. Once might be excusable. Twice in one morning no doubt less so. The guilt intensified.   
  
When he made it into the classroom, clinging to a cup of jet-black caf like it might miraculously hide his morning activities behind a cloud of steam, James was already there. James was, in fact, also freshly showered and luscious, hair disheveled in a way that suggested studied carelessness and invited fingers to run through it, and was bending over a holodesk, fiddling with controls and saying, “Does that look any clearer?” to a wide-eyed Rodian girl.   
  
The only thoughts in Michael’s head revolved around _James, bending over,_ and _why is he always bending over oh please turn this way just a little more_ and _is this some sort of test of willpower?_ If the last, he was failing, he was utterly sure.    
  
At this point he walked into the corner of his desk. Not on purpose. It was closer than he’d thought. It hurt.   
  
Half the student gazes swiveled to him.   
  
James spun around too, upright again, which should’ve helped but didn’t because now wide blue eyes were focused on his. “Oh, good morning! Sorry, should I have met you somewhere, I just got distracted, I’ve not had a decent non-sonic shower for weeks—oh, ah, Amee’s desk was malfunctioning, just a settings thing, I think I’ve got it sorted out, I know we probably have maintenance people but—”   
  
“James,” Michael said, and then had to think of words to follow the name. “Um. Thank you. You don’t have to—we do have maintenance people. But thanks. Um, we’re doing astromech schematics starting today, you probably already know a lot of this, so, ah, I won’t make you come to every class, or you can if you want a reminder, or you can sort of help out, if you want? Guys, this is James, he’s my sort of um. Apprentice.”   
  
The student stares transferred back to James. One of the blond-haired human boys, the twelve-year-old from Tatooine, said, “Aren’t you a little old to be a new apprentice?” half curious and half challenging.   
  
Michael opened his mouth, ready to jump.   
  
“I am,” James said easily, “but, y’know, I was a bit busy being an actor, I got to work with Garik Loran’s great-great-grandson, I could tell you that story sometime. I sort of crashed a speeder into his racing bike, on accident, on set, I’ve even got the scar.”   
  
Half the boys in the class leaned that way. Quite a few of the girls—and a few more of the boys—sighed as James rolled up a pant leg. Michael, caught between amused and impressed and slightly annoyed at how readily James had conquered his classroom, gave them a single minute of hero-worship, and then said, “Astromech schematics, please,” and then said it again over a chorus of grumbles.   
  
Amee tugged on James’s sleeve. Handed him, very gravely, a dragonberry-nectar lollipop. James accepted this thank-you gift with appropriate solemnity, and glanced at Michael’s face, and nudged her back to circuit diagrams.   
  
After class, James wandered up to the front, grinning, hands hooked casually into his belt. “They’re sweet.”   
  
“They adore you.”   
  
“I’m adorable. You said we’d talk about my curriculum, today?”    
  
“I…yes…are you going to eat that…now?”    
  
“Should I not?” James paused, fingers unwrapping the lollipop. “Some sort of rule about food in classrooms? I can wait.”   
  
“Um. Not a rule. Never mind. Go on.” He’d never been more grateful for the height of his desk. James’s lips around orange-scarlet sugar rings were positively obscene. Glimpses of pink tongue. Mouth lazily sucking on sweetness. Michael’s hands found the edge of carved wood and clung. “Patrick wanted to see you. After lunch. So…” Oh no, oh _no_ , James had paused to look up at him, sugar-stick slipping languidly free of wet lips.   
  
“…so…um…you should. Do that. First. Because he gets priority with you, obviously.” Priority with James, indeed. His brain had plainly shut off in favor of diverting bloodflow elsewhere.   
  
“Okay, that makes sense.” James licked dissolving sugar from the corner of his mouth. “I think I will keep coming, if you don’t mind.”   
  
“You…what?”    
  
“To your class. This morning seemed to work out well, I thought. Like me being your teaching assistant. Is that a thing? I know it is at universities and such, but is it here?”   
  
“It can be. And it might be helpful…I know you’re older than most of them, but…”   
  
“I’ve not exactly spent time in the Jedi Academy, have I? And it’s good practice, too. Keeping their emotions out, and mine in.” James contemplated the last clinging bits of sugar. Nibbled them from the stick, white teeth and that adventurous tongue. His mouth doubtless tasted like berries and nectar, Michael thought, fiery honey and happy skin; and from now on lollipops were going to be banned in his classroom. Too provocative. Overly stimulating.   
  
“So is there something I should be doing now? I’ve got a free hour, I think, before lunch. Unless there’s something no one’s told me. I could help you with…whatever you need an apprentice for, for an hour.”   
  
Michael had to, at this point, sit down. James promptly sat on his desk. Michael carefully took the internal shrieking about what they could do with James on his desk and barricaded it all behind durasteel doors. James raised an eyebrow. “I felt that, you know. I’m not quite sure what it was, that last bit, but I felt it.”   
  
“It’s— _were you listening to that?”_   
  
“At first I was trying not to, but you were completely shouting my name. It’s not as if I mind. I like sex. For the record, yes, berries and nectar; and I’m phenomenal in bed. I can pick up and amplify _all_ your emotions, y’know.”   
  
Michael, very slowly, put his face in his hands. Said, behind muffling palms, “Please go wait in the library until I figure out how to give you to someone else for the next few months.”   
  
Silence. Abrupt and heavy. No sound at all.   
  
Michael dropped the hands. Looked up.   
  
James was gone.   
  
James couldn’t be gone that quickly. Impossible. Even for Jedi.   
  
Except the door was swinging open and shut, and if he squinted at that patch of air with nonphysical eyes he could sort of see dark hair and a flicker of moving hand—   
  
Patrick’d said, about James: he does have an astonishingly good self-effacement shield, and he’s excellent at hiding what’s important.   
  
There’d been an undercurrent in James’s voice, rocks beneath the New Glasgow rivers. I’m phenomenal in bed, James’d said, I can amplify all your emotions.    
  
And that’d been true, and the offer’d been sincere; Michael was a good enough empath, if not on James’s level because no one was on James’s level, to get that much. James genuinely liked sex, liked giving people what would make them feel good, what they might want or crave or need, and he’d do it without shame and so the person he was with would never feel ashamed either—   
  
And that was the undercurrent, deep and deadly. James had sex because other people wanted him.    
  
Because he knew he could offer them release and relief, no strings attached, only generosity. Compassion. Not the same as desire. Even if James did enjoy himself along the way: not the same.   
  
Michael, horrified, stood up so fast he ran into his desk again.    
  
Of course his phrasing’d been exactly wrong. He’d said he wanted to give James away.   
  
He’d meant that he didn’t know how he could possibly do this for a second day, let alone another indeterminate several months. He hadn’t _meant_ it.   
  
He’d still said it. And James’d made the offer out of kindness, friendliness, sex being simply sex; but they’d had more, they’d been starting to have more, he’d watched James with his students and talked about planning a curriculum and a relationship that _wasn’t_ sex and of course James had heard those final words and walked away—   
  
The library was two floors down. He ran.   
  
James was standing by a picture window, gazing out at Coruscant traffic. Airspeeders and swoops and personal transports of all kinds. Buzzing amid crowded lanes, a swarm of sentient beings bustling through the city-planet’s levels, climbing and falling, anonymous.   
  
He turned when Michael came sprinting through the doors, though his gaze landed someplace over Michael’s shoulder. “Did you come up with a name? Someone you might send me to?”   
  
“No,” Michael said, “no, I didn’t, I—”   
  
“Ah. Do I stay long enough to meet with Patrick, then, or do I leave now?”   
  
“Oh no,” Michael said this time, breathless not because of the run but because he could hear the resignation in that accent but not _feel_ it, James holding everything in, and his heart was crying inside his chest, “no, I mean I didn’t because I want you, I mean I want to work with you, I’m sorry, I’ve thoroughly fucked this up already and I’m trying to apologize, James, please. That was stupid, I never know when to sort of stop talking and I—I just meant I’m not used to someone in my head and—I know it’s not your fault, I’m sorry, please look at me.”   
  
James did, briefly. The eyes slid away and found the floor. “Yes, sir.”   
  
“Don’t. Just—I’ll figure this out. You know I want you. Like—like that, yes. And I know you would—you’d offer. But I don’t want you to offer. I mean I do, but—” He stopped. Pleaded, hopelessly, “I’m trying to be responsible, y’know? I’ve never had an apprentice before. And you—I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt you.”   
  
That last sentence surprised even him. He knew it was true as he said it; he’d just not planned the words. Some coaxing of the Force, perhaps. Some fleeting intuition, landing at the right time.   
  
James looked up, startled into meeting his gaze. “You…don’t want to hurt…me. You are aware I’m more or less a witch myself—I do know that’s not technically accurate, Nightsisters’re female, Gran would have opinions about that, but I am anyway—and I’ve heard just about every emotion one sentient being can have toward another. There’s not much left you can do.”   
  
“That doesn’t make it untrue.”   
  
James hesitated. Ran a tongue over pink lips, candy-bright, remnants of sweetness. “What people say…that matters. I’m not a telepath, or not more than any other Jedi. I only pick up emotion. And that’s half the time different from what words get chosen. Not always, but it means something, what people decide to admit or—or lie about, or conceal. Out of kindness, more often than not. That used to surprise me, how much kinder people are than they realize.”   
  
“You know I mean it,” Michael said, and held out a hand. “I’m not saying I won’t fuck up again, it’s probably a given, you know my shields’re absolute shite around you, and I’ll work on it. But that means you can hear me. And I don’t want to hurt you.”   
  
In the background, two hovercabs narrowly avoided a collision. The drivers honked at each other angrily, but spun away into the flow of traffic, safe.   
  
James put out a hand, tentative and cautious and hopeful, and set it in his. Blue eyes met Michael’s own.    
  
And the world changed, not an enormous shift but one reflected everywhere, omnipresent, butterfly-wings over bare skin. A quivering in the invisible lines around them. The Force reacting, tremors like a million plucked lutestrings, like joy.   
  
James blinked. “Does…that…happen often, around here?”   
  
“No,” Michael said, holding James’s hand. He’d meant to properly shake it, to seal the agreement, but somehow they’d just ended up that way, holding hands in front of the library window, surrounded by tall dusty interested bookshelves and each other’s presence. James’s fingers curled hesitantly around his own. Michael squeezed back, only a little. “No, it doesn’t. Not that I remember.”   
  
“Oh,” James said, starting to smile. The moment stretched out like liquid glass, timeless and brilliant around them.   
  
And then was shattered by Patrick and Ian roaring simultaneously, _What in the name of Skywalker himself did you two do, half the instructors swear there was an earthquake and the other half say they’ve just had spontaneous orgasms and they ALL want to know what just happened—_   
  
James looked at Michael. Michael looked right back. James grinned, swift and wicked, and shouted, _We made the earth move for you, sirs!_ Michael all but fell over laughing.   
  
_ Oh Force defend us we’ve created a monster, _ Patrick muttered, plus some musings along the line of _bloody empaths, honestly,_ and _ridiculous boys, were we ever that young, hmph._   
  
_ You still are! _ Michael called up, and Ian said cheerfully _he’s got a point, and, darling, you did say we had a good feeling about this. We’ll handle the questions on this end, and is anyone truly objecting to the orgasms?_   
  
“Not me,” James said aloud, and Michael leaned a little closer and said, “Still not appropriate,” knowing James would laugh, and proven right.    
  
“So,” he added, “honestly, you’ll probably need the hour off, if you’re helping me in the mornings and having private sessions with Patrick and sitting in on your history class and, um, whatever you and I need to work on—stop smiling—but for today…you’ve probably been to Coruscant, I mean of course you have, premieres and—but, um, we could skip the Academy dining hall and I could buy you a Krayt bacon burger at Whistler’s, if you’ve never been?”   
  
“I have been to Coruscant, yes.” James tapped fingers over the back of Michael’s hand, not letting go. “For premieres. Very theatrical. High-class hotels and expensive restaurants and all that. I can honestly say I’ve never been to a proper tapcafe. Wasn’t the original Whistler’s on Trogan? And abandoned, oh, centuries ago?”   
  
“It was. Someone bought it and had it shipped here and restored. It’s full of tourists and incredibly tacky and it still feels like smugglers’ history, you know, despite all that, when you first walk in. Like tangible stories, sort of. You might like it.”   
  
“Incredibly tacky, full of stories, Krayt bacon burgers.” Ocean-wave eyes sparkled: James, smiling up at him. “I like everything you’ve just said. I mean—everything. I’m very much in.”


	3. scoundrel? I like that.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which James and Michael do some training, and very emphatically do not have sex. Really. ~~Not yet.~~

One week. Two. Three. James adapted astonishingly well, more easily than Michael himself recalled coming to terms with separation from his previous life. James made friends with half a dozen senior-year students, awkward Nick and easy-laughter Jen and tall pale-eyed Benedict, and showed up in the mornings bright-eyed and enthusiastic and occasionally hungover, though never less than articulate and kind.   
  
He brought Michael cups of jet-black morning caf every day. Michael at first tried to say he didn’t have to, then wondered whether James was simply picking up the craving and unconsciously responding. James tilted an eyebrow at him, said, “Very consciously responding, sir,” and took a sip of his own spiced-cream concoction, sweetness and exotic flavors in a cup. Michael stared at the cream where it lingered on luscious lips.    
  
James grinned and licked the cream away with a swipe of tongue, more teasing than inviting. The gesture said: I know and you know and thank you for the compliment and thank you for the other part and we’re in no hurry.   
  
It also added: but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun imagining. Michael sighed, letting the sound be audible, and ordered James to go fit in extra agility training, levitation and backflips and catching objects while distracted. James saluted, textbook-cheeky, and went.    
  
James _did_ make friends quickly. Friends; and more. Michael was all but certain of that. He’d caught James talking softly to fellow trainees in corridors, one hand lifted to gently brush tangled hair out of a Corellian smuggler’s daughter’s amber eyes, or with an arm slipping casually around the waist of a nervous Chiss boy, offering unspoken support. He’d seen James tilt a head back and smile at a proprietary trail of twin sinuous Twi’lek _lekku_ over shoulders. And he’d walked into the dining hall mid-afternoon at the end of the second week to discover his apprentice half-asleep and blissful, being groomed by the cat-tongues and kneading paws of two of the Cathar apprentices, unrelated, a tom and a queen.   
  
At least James had been dressed. He’d registered that much before he’d fled. And then he’d sat, shaking, behind his desk in his empty classroom for a while, no longer hungry.   
  
He didn’t have the right to tell James not to sleep with other people. No rules against it. Hells, James probably needed it, needed the outlet for everyone else’s emotions. Like therapy. For them, for him.   
  
Michael’d _told_ him that sex on Michael’s desk—in Michael’s bed, in _James’s_ bed, onboard James’s ship, in a storage closet, anywhere, everywhere, yes _please_ —wasn’t going to happen. Had been responsible about it. And James had agreed, and they were, clumsily, experimentally, becoming something like friends.   
  
All of that was true.   
  
And Michael nevertheless wanted to scream.   
  
James _was_ his apprentice. His friend. And he wanted more. He wanted so much more. And they both knew it. And he _couldn’t_.   
  
Professional reasons. No taking advantage of his student. Personal reasons. No taking advantage of his too-generous friend.   
  
Jedi weren’t jealous. Shouldn’t be jealous. Consequences.    
  
His heart physically hurt. He’d never known it could do that.   
  
James had come to find him about twenty minutes after the dining-hall encounter, yawning, hair tugged into improbable fluffy shapes and parallel red claw-scratches visible at the edge of his sleeve. “Sorry, Michael.”   
  
“Don’t apologize to me.”   
  
“I could feel those thoughts the whole way here, y’know.” James had crossed arms. Propped a hip against the desk. Like he was comfortable, like he belonged.   
  
He did. He always would. Michael’d shoved down a surge of irrational anger. James couldn’t help that, being a empath, instinctively reacting to the world’s smiles and frowns, always comfortable because he could fit into whatever shape would ease tensions all around—   
  
“That’s not true,” James had said, “and you know it, and I know you know it, but thanks for not saying it out loud.” And the smile was crooked, wry, self-deprecating: he’d spoken before Michael’d found words.   
  
“I know,” Michael had said back, and ran a hand through his hair. “I know. I’m sorry.” He was. He did know. James making everyone else comfortable was not the same as James being comfortable. Not necessarily comfortable for James at all.   
  
“As it happens, I’ve not had sex with those two. Separately or together, mind you.”   
  
“You haven’t—oh. Oh, you haven’t—I mean you can. Of course. If you want to. I mean I’m not—it’s not my job to tell you what you can do when you’re not training. Um. Or who you can—You don’t have to give that up. Not because of me.”   
  
This had earned a raised eyebrow. “I know. I might listen if you asked for that, but because it’d be you asking, not because I think you have the right to ask. If that made any sense. Too much asking. But either way I’m not sleeping with the fluffballs, as lovely and soft as they are. If you were wanting to know.”   
  
Michael, who’d thought he _had_ known, and consequently was presently being strangled by mortification and relief and shameful thankfulness, unearthed a nod. Probably not enough of a reply. James’s shields were getting better, two weeks into sessions with Patrick’s experienced hands.   
  
“They’re only lonely.” James tried to get a good look at the back of his own shoulder. Couldn’t quite manage it. “They miss having siblings, litter-mates, kits around. I don’t mind being an adopted kitten, though I wish they’d remember I’ve got thinner skin…”   
  
“Please be careful,” Michael’d said, one hand helplessly lifted, a futile tiny gesture. And James’s smile had become marginally more true. A resurfacing sparkle in blue eyes. “I am. I promise.”   
  
Around them, the afternoon shimmered. Woodwork and comprehension and solitude. A space made purely for them.   
  
James’d added contemplatively, “I was sort of enjoying myself. Relaxing. Tired. Patrick forgets I’ve not been doing this for five hundred years. Yesterday he wanted me to simultaneously break up six bar fights in various cantinas and on top of that tell him how the Republic Guardsmen were feeling, on duty over at the Senate Chamber…I think he’s pushing me, but I’m not sure why. The massage felt good until they forgot about the claws. Is that one bleeding?”   
  
“Yes…kind of a lot…can I…put something on it for you?” He’d come around the desk instinctively, pulling up the sleeve in question; James perched on the corner, turned enough for a better angle, and settled trustingly into Michael’s touch. Michael’d swallowed. Dug numbing cream out of the medikit in his desk. Bandages, bacta-infused.    
  
James’s skin felt warm and tempting beneath his hands. Freckle-stars over pale snow. Galaxies in reverse, artistic spangles across a wounded sky.   
  
He’d murmured, hands busy, “You think Patrick’s pushing you…”   
  
“He’s worried. Oh—”   
  
“Did that hurt?”   
  
“No…only cold…feels amazing, though. You have spectacular hands. I don’t think he and Ian know I know. And I’ve not picked up anything specific. Just…mmm, thank you…general sort of…worry. Undefined. I get it in flashes. When they’re focused on trying to see how far I can reach, how clearly I can read people I’ve never met…like they think I’ll be needed. Ah, marvelous, fifty times better, thanks…” James had stretched experimentally, remaining securely in Michael’s space, close enough to wrap arms around. “I used to think being an actor was hard. But projecting emotion’s the easy part, really.”   
  
Michael’d not moved, because James hadn’t moved. So close, enough to feel the puff of breath when James sighed. Enough for James’s hair to tangle on Michael’s collar, with the next head-tip. “I can ask them about it. Why they’re pushing you.”   
  
“You don’t have to. I’m okay. And I’m not sure I’m supposed to know.” But James had leaned back against him, shoulders tiredly cautious of new bandages. Michael put an arm around him, not thinking, not worrying about consequences. James needed to be held.   
  
He said, “You’re my apprentice. My responsibility. So I do sort of have the right to yell at them. If they’re hurting you. I will, for you.”   
  
And James had glanced at his face, eyes startled and appreciative, the latter shading into gratitude, fondness, and some other emotion, one Michael wanted to name and, breathless, didn’t dare. “Ask me again next week, then. Thank you, sir.”   
  
“Michael. Please.”   
  
“Thank you,” James had said again, and accepted an arm, hopping down from the desk. “Michael.”   
  
That’d been the end of week two. James hadn’t mentioned the tiredness since, whether out of a need to prove that he could handle it or in some determined attempt to protect Michael from efforts to intervene. Michael, however, had looked at weary blue eyes midway through week three, sent James off to meditate for an hour—the argument that’d worked had involved Michael’s own need to catch up on mid-year student evaluations; not a lie—and then sprinted up to Patrick’s office, flung open the door, and proceeded to swear at his Heads in back-alley Coruscant slum argot, followed by a demand that they ease up on James right the fuck then and there and for good measure explain themselves.    
  
They’d glanced at each other. Ian had let a stray thought slip out, directed at Patrick— _love, really, do we have to work on YOUR shields—?_ Patrick put a hand on Michael’s shoulder. Michael’d found himself sitting down with no memory of taking a chair.   
  
“We can’t tell you everything,” Ian’d said. “It’s important. But you’ll have to trust us. Please.”   
  
“What is,” Michael had growled, shaking off the hand, letting emotion snap and sear like lightning through the air.   
  
Ian had promised that they’d tell him. Eventually. Not yet. Not now. No denying the fact that they _had_ been pushing James.   
  
Patrick had apologized. Michael glared, and told them to apologize to James instead. They promptly did that too, which was the only reason Michael had yet to throw one of their desks through the wall.   
  
Part of the problem lay in James’s lack of formal training overall, no sense of solid ground and center, the first structures trainees ever learned. Patrick and Ian needed him to have range, to stretch outward; he couldn’t, not as far as they believed he could, without internal balance and focus. Like skyscrapers on too narrow a base, Ian’d said. James had a decent self-sense, an intuitive grasp of the bits that were his thoughts and no one else’s; but that intuition’d always been enough to get by, and no one’d given him any guidance about foundation.   
  
So, on the afternoon of the first day of the fourth week—Michael’d made that a condition, everyone leaving James alone for at least three days—he took his apprentice to the training room he’d reserved, all floor mats and white walls and shelves of puzzle-balls and throwing-sticks and perches for bouncing to and from, and scooped the largest cool crystal sphere out of its stand with a tug of power.   
  
“Have you played with these, at all?”   
  
“No?”   
  
“Okay, they’re kind of fun. They’re all designed to be manipulated using the Force in various ways. Those little ones over there’re purely mental. Mazes. The big ones with pink sand are for composing shapes—”   
  
“Oh, is that an X-wing, that’s brilliant—”   
  
“—and _these_ are about clarity and precision.” He let the X-wing sculpture dissolve into its component grains, with some satisfied pride. James’d called him brilliant.    
  
James looked better, today. Eyes more alert. Shoulders straighter. The short break’d helped, then. Michael couldn’t not be satisfied, and relieved, about that too.    
  
“I can hear you, you know.”   
  
“You were meant to. At least that one.”   
  
“Should I be irritated that you think I need rescuing, or just shut up and say thank you, then, sir?”   
  
“You should try to focus,” Michael said, and tossed the ball at him. James plucked it out of the air with Force-honed reflexes, and turned it around in curious fingers. “That’s your main problem. Narrowing it all down. Patrick’s going to help you with refinement, persuasion, manipulation, probably conquering the known universe. But you don’t have the basics, sort of. We’re starting with this.”   
  
Blue eyes regarded the crystal sphere dubiously. “Okay…”   
  
“You can see the colors, right? All mixed together?” The sand glinted and glimmered, ochre and emerald and garnet and topaz and sapphire hues. Different weights. Different densities. But at present mingled in a confusing snarl of lights. This particular puzzle-ball was one of the easiest, meant for the youngest students; he was hoping James wouldn’t take it as an insult. This was, after all, part of why they’d been paired. So that he could give James the basics.    
  
Not so that he could kiss James senseless. It’d be a good idea to remember that. Too bad his entire body wasn’t getting the message. James looked so beautiful, so kissable, healthy and unafraid to cheerfully mock his overprotective tendencies, here in the white-walled room with the practice toys.   
  
“Right. You want me to separate them?”   
  
“Exactly.”   
  
“That…doesn’t sound as difficult as I feel like it ought to be. What don’t I know?”   
  
“Nothing, really. It’s not meant to be difficult. It does require you to…shut everything else out. Focus. They’re all little and sort of slippery, the grains. It’s like a meditation aid, kind of.”   
  
“Oh.” James tossed the ball into the air, caught it, spun it around. “So you in fact did mean basics. One simple thing.”   
  
“Here.” He held out a hand; James flicked the puzzle his direction. “Watch me.” As always, the sensation tingled, slow and abrupt at the same time: the arrival of awareness, of recognition, like different layers in a sunwarmed pool, bright on the surface but cooler and deeper in spots, swirls, and eddies. The sand separated itself into tidy rows, clean-cut stripes of gemstone hues. James raised eyebrows. “Quick.”   
  
“I’ve played with these before.” Not for years, but no point in saying so. Anyway, he’d forgotten how much fun they in fact could be, that straightforward uncomplicated rush of accomplishment. “Your turn.”   
  
James looked at the newly re-shaken sand for a while. Nothing happened.   
  
“Can you sort of…they should feel different. The layers.”    
  
“I know. They _do_.”   
  
“Then…I know you’re decent at telekinesis…”   
  
“It’s not that.” James scowled. The sand gazed back, limpid blended rainbows. “I can’t not…when I try to make myself be quiet I feel everything else. You. Other apprentices, at least eight of whom’re currently having sex, three with each other. Two people panicking about Ian’s obstacle course exam. The Academy chefs being excited about Patrick’s birthday dinner next week. And I keep losing track of me—of this.”   
  
“Do you need an anchor?” He put a hand on the closest sturdy shoulder. It felt slumped in defeat. It also nevertheless felt wonderful, all those muscles, the way James silently leaned into the touch. “I can jump in. Pull you out.”    
  
“No, I’m good at tethers, I know which one I am, I just can’t…if I stop thinking about myself, if I only look outward, it gets too loud. If I don’t look, I can’t see your sand. But if I do, I get distracted and drop them…”   
  
“Can you watch me again? I mean come in while I do it.” This was in fact a bit worrying. He did know James’s strength lay in emotional connection, people drawn to him and him to them. The _decent_ assessment of telekinetic skills had been fair. But even the first-year students could generally manage this one. And, in fact, it wasn’t that James couldn’t. It was a question of getting overwhelmed.   
  
Michael gritted teeth. Made a mental note to shout at Patrick again. This wasn’t fair to either of them. James deserved better. Someone who actually knew how to work with a complicated apprentice. With any apprentice.   
  
“I can try.”   
  
Right. He’d asked whether James wanted to come in. And James was saying yes.   
  
That, unfortunately, was not any kind of euphemism. No sharing of lifts. Only thoughts.   
  
He’d trust James with his thoughts. He’d trust James in his rooms. In his bed.   
  
“What was that?”   
  
“What—nothing! Never mind. Knock first.” Shields. Partitions. _Strong_ ones. What he should’ve done before ever making the offer. Being professional, being a good Master for James—   
  
No. _Not_ that phrasing. Fuck.   
  
“Something about your bed, was it?” Flirtatiously intrigued, but almost more of a reflex, Michael thought, glancing at annoyed blue eyes. The annoyance wasn’t for him; James was glaring at the sand. The seductive tone was somewhat incongruous, given that, though no easier to resist. “And, by the way, I do knock first. Only polite. Of course, you could leave the door unlocked and be ready for me…”   
  
“We are _not_ having sex in my head, James!”   
  
“We’re not having it in your bed, either. All right, not appropriate, I know, but you weren’t the one just emotionally in the middle of a human-Bothan-Twi’lek threesome, either. I’m only a bit frustrated. More than one way. Sorry, sir.”   
  
Michael stared at the puzzle-ball with all his might, and said, “Do you, ah, need a, um, minute?”   
  
“No, I’m used to it. Won’t get any better—well, no, it might for them, seemed to be going rather well—if we wait. I’ll keep it out of your head; Patrick’s been working on projection filters with me.”   
  
“Um. Okay. If you’re sure.” As if James needed to bother. The lust was already there. Sizzling happily away. “Come on, then.”   
  
Almost before he’d finished the invitation, James was. And it felt so _right_.    
  
This _was_ James’s strength, easy as breathing, effortless as a fall into clouds. James was obviously keeping that promise, maintaining divisions; he curled up like a delighted kitten in the space Michael’d cleared for observation, tucking paws in, watching. No hint of any emotions other than respect, trust, lurking self-directed irritation, and a kind of shy excitement at being allowed in, being trusted in turn.   
  
James was a witch’s grandson. Michael knew he’d slept with any number of sentient beings, had given them his body and his boundless compassion. And he wondered, knowing all of that, how many people had ever trusted James with their minds.   
  
He was still jealous—that one wasn’t going away any time soon, in the face of imaginings about other hands on exuberantly freckled skin, other lips claiming all that kindness—but the jealousy felt more melancholic, all of a sudden. Complicated and wistful. Regret and a tiny bit of hope that made him wince at its presence. James gave other people what they needed, what he hadn’t shared with Michael. But this—   
  
He thought that maybe this was something James had never had, or not too often, at least.    
  
And he was profoundly honored to be there, feeling James’s hesitant pleasure in his mind.   
  
Right. Not the time. If there ever would be a time. Focus. Training. Why they were here.   
  
He pushed those treacherously intense emotions back behind walls, stacked musings about the latest pod-racing engine developments atop them, and reached out for the shimmering sand in the crystal ball in James’s hand.   
  
He ran through the exercise twice, letting James feel it: the physicality shifting, moving, being weighed and sorted. James sent back the mental impression of a nod— _got it, okay, yes_ —and tried.   
  
The world tipped sideways. Emotions cascading in. None of them his. Love and arousal and admiration and the white heat of climax and tears of grief and a yelp of pain; scattering stars from all the minds and feelings in the Temple, all the minds out there in wide-flung eternity, brilliant singing sparks each tuned to a fractionally different key, piloting home or setting out to beat a Kessel Run record or filing paperwork or kissing littermates goodbye or making love to a second-tier pleasure-husband—   
  
_ Sorry! _ James yanked everything back—mentally, physically—and then swore out loud, impressively profane. “Ow, fuck, that hurt, sorry, did I hurt you—”   
  
“No…I don’t think so…” Dizzy, shaken by the immensity, but not hurt. Experimentally, he poked the empty space where James’s presence’d just been. Like—nothing he’d ever quite felt, that emptiness. Like he’d never known what piece had fit, and then he _had_ known, and then he’d felt it jerked away. “Is that…you feel that…all the time?”   
  
“Not that strong.” James was panting, eyes screwed shut in pain. “I do have shields. I lost them, though—I was trying to keep it away from you, and still open up enough to get what you were doing, and then reach out and do it myself—I couldn’t balance it all. I’m sorry, are you okay, this is what I meant when I said I might be dangerous, I think I was able to catch most of your headache, you shouldn’t get much backlash, but how bad is it?”   
  
James had done that on purpose. Had kept the presence of mind—and the instinct—to keep Michael safe. Even in that maelstrom.   
  
Michael might’ve been feeling lust before. Attraction, desire, instant longing to bend all those pocket-sized muscles over the nearest item of furniture. He was used to that, by now.    
  
Standing on wobbly feet across from James in the vacant practice room, looking at the lines around closed blue eyes, he _felt_ the moment of tipping-over. Love. Just like that.    
  
Of course it was love. It was James.   
  
His apprentice. His apprentice, whom he’d just allowed to be hurt. Who was apologizing for not taking _all_ of the hurt.   
  
“I’m fine!—are you? Do you need to sit down? Water, perigen tabs, anything?” Most Jedi could pain-block, at least partially so, but James almost certainly couldn’t right now, and there were reasons why the Academy kept perigen and nullicaine and other medical supplies on hand. He could get…something. Whatever James needed.   
  
“No…to everything, I mean. I’m not fine, but it’ll go away.” James opened both eyes, winced, rubbed a temple. “I’ve always been pretty resilient, with backlash. Gran thinks it’s a defense mechanism. Natural physiological compensation. I’d end up with permanent migraines, otherwise; kind of hard to be an actor, to have any job, when you’re flat on your back in bed with a planetful of emotions in your head. ’s partly why I’m okay picking up yours too. It’ll fade.”   
  
“You didn’t have to.”   
  
“I know.” A grin, pain-nibbled but mischievous. “I wanted to. Sir. I can try again, if you want. I know you were worried about me not getting this.”   
  
“It’s not…” He stopped. “At least sit down. You look like you’ve been kicked by a bantha.”   
  
“Oh, thanks very much.” James did accept the hand on his shoulder, steering him over to the bench along the wall, however. And then tipped his head back against the wall and sighed. “I don’t know what I’m doing, sometimes. Like this. I can see what you’re doing, I can…I just can’t quite…” One hand made a forlorn plucking-at-air gesture, levitating the colorful sphere. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here.”   
  
“But you should be here,” Michael said, immediate and truthful, truthful in at least two ways, about the Jedi Order, about his own heart and soul. “I think you just proved that.”   
  
“What, by fucking up the easiest thing you’ve asked me to do?”   
  
“Oh,” Michael said, fundamentally shocked. He’d never heard James be lost before. And he remembered the first night they’d met, and uncertainty beneath the exuberance in ocean-wave eyes. “No. Not that. I mean you protected me. Without even thinking about it.”   
  
“Of course I—”   
  
“What are Jedi, James? I know you know. The first sentence in that pompous textbook they make you read in your History class.”   
  
“Um…is this a very strange trick question? Don’t you have your own copy somewhere? ‘The Jedi are protectors of the helpless, guardians of peace and justice and—’”   
  
Michael raised eyebrows. Meaningfully.    
  
James sighed. Wordlessly.   
  
“You do see where I’m going with this.”   
  
“...maybe. Yes. Okay, thank you, yes, sir. I honestly like that book. Pompous, granted, but it’s got personality.”   
  
“Please don’t tell me you’ve read all fifteen volumes.”   
  
“I like reading. Y’know…I think I’ve got an idea.” James tucked a foot under himself on the bench. Caught the spinning ball in one hand. “I can’t do what you do. I can see it, but I can’t copy it. Can I try something?”   
  
“Depends. How’re you feeling?”   
  
“Better. I can’t shut off the emotions. That’s where my connection to the Force is, right? The living elements, not as much the universal material ones? So I think that’s part of the problem. Come be an anchor, this time, in case I’m wrong? I’ll stay out, but I want the safety net.”   
  
“Of course—” Excitement, all at once, along his veins. He had an idea what James was thinking. Would’ve never occurred to him, but he wanted to see it work. He thought maybe it would. He thought James could. “Here, jump back in, I’ll catch you if you need it. Don’t hurt yourself.”   
  
“Yes, Gran.” James flung a slim tendril of power his way, silver-blue and shining. Michael caught it, shouted back, _I’m not your grandmother, James!_ and heard the answering merriment, echoing all down the line. _Okay, ready, do what you’re thinking—_   
  
James grinned, shut his eyes, and fell into the Force. The world lit up. Starfire and joy. Incorporeal fingers brushing grains of sand, not picking out the physical tangible properties of each but reaching into impressions, memories, generations of Force-sensitive adepts nudging colors into accustomed shapes, sometimes with frustration, sometimes with ease, sometimes with painstaking care. The sand remembered, the way that stone and cathedrals and temple walls and hallowed ground remembered. Every vanished emotion leaving traces behind through time.   
  
_ Ah, _ James said, _there,_ and they both watched as every iridescent color straightened itself out and fell into line, rainbows flawlessly accounted for.   
  
For good measure, every other puzzle-ball in the room quivered as well. Shapes rising up in sand-sculpture, metal balls rattling through mazes, keys spinning in Force-locks and flying free.   
  
James turned to look at him, laughing, blazing like a thousand suns throughout infinity, every emotion across time and space summoned to play along; Michael shouted, _come back, I’ll catch you,_ and found himself laughing too, exhilaration too vast to be contained.   
  
James resurfaced trembling slightly, not with pain but with euphoria, eyes radiant as they blinked and returned to the present. “That…I can’t…I don’t even have words for…”   
  
Michael didn’t either. There _weren’t_ words. He wasn’t sure anyone else could’ve done it, ever, the same way. He’d had no idea how powerful James truly was. And he was getting the euphoria also, at secondhand; and was, as a result of all these colliding factors, a bit off-balance, thrilled for them both, and incredibly turned on.   
  
He said, because someone had to, “You’re going to come down hard, from that…”   
  
“Oh, I know…but not yet, I can still feel…” James looked at his hands as if he’d never seen them before. Curled fingers in and out, awed and testing. “Everything. Everyone who ever…that might’ve been overkill…”   
  
“That’s one word for it,” Michael said, and put a hand on his back, unobtrusive support. “You could’ve settled for my memories, come on, I had the worst time with that miniature quartet maze, you could probably hear me swearing at it, in there…”   
  
“Oh, that was you, was it, with that filthy vocabulary, I should’ve known…” James breathed out, slowly. “I didn’t know I could do that. Thank you.”   
  
“You did it,” Michael said, and inched the arm further around his shoulders. “I was just sort of here. And impressed. I’m here and impressed. Tell me when you think you’re going to want to stand up.”   
  
“What, because I’m going to need help? I did tell you I can handle backlash, why—” James’s face went absolutely white. Eyes huge and stunned. “Oh.”   
  
“I did try to warn you.” It wasn’t physical, or not as much so, this time. It was loneliness. The staggering immensity of having touched so many hearts, held so many connections across time and space—and then having to let go.    
  
And James had been drawing on not merely nearby emotions, but whole centuries of passion and determination and irritation and triumph, brought together around drifting colorful sand. So much to lose.   
  
“You did—” James said, and then started crying, shocked and involuntary. Michael put both arms around him and held him, one hand rubbing his back, cheek resting in his hair, and murmured soft soothing sounds that weren’t quite words. Probably inappropriate. He didn’t care.   
  
He did reach out, very carefully, and brush mental invitation across embattled shields, not asking but offering, keeping himself open. Their connection felt raw and tender, in his head, even to the lightest touch; but that was the abrupt isolation of withdrawal, and while James would have to level out eventually, even one quiet link would help for now.    
  
He could let James feel it all. Everything he was, if it’d make a difference. He wasn’t ashamed.   
  
He said, _you’re not alone, you can hear me, I’m here._ And James wrapped mental fingers around his offering, clinging to the lifeline without tugging hard, and gradually stopped crying.   
  
_ Better? _   
  
_ Yes. I can let go, if you want.  _ “Thank you.” James ran a hand over his face, dashing away tears, flicking the puzzle-ball back to its shelf with a half-sketched wave. Somewhere in there the afternoon’d transmuted to evening; Michael couldn’t see the cityscape from the windowless room, but he had a fairly good internal chronometer, not to mention the one on the wall. “I think…next time I’ll have limits in place. I know what I’m doing, now.”   
  
“You can stay in as long as you need to. I don’t mind.” He didn’t. “Are you hungry? That’s going to be part of it too, if it’s not already.”   
  
“Starving.” James sat up more, and left a scrap of awareness nestled in the back of Michael’s head: not consciously observing but simply present, a line of bagpipe melody woven into the background and tying disparate songs together. “Not tired exactly…I could try again, later, or tomorrow…Michael?”   
  
“Hmm?” His hand had found its way to the back of James’s neck. Was kneading gently, fingers over soft skin and curling wisps of hair. “If you can make it back to your room, I can bring you food.”   
  
“I’d like that.” James was looking better with every passing second; he’d not been lying, then, about his recuperative powers. Michael’s heart threw celebrations of thanks for that. Parades and confetti and bone-deep tremulous reprieve.   
  
“…that wasn’t what I was going to ask you. Might be personal, though.”   
  
“Anything.”   
  
“You’re a better empath than people think you are, aren’t you?” Ocean-wave eyes looked up at him; not far up, nearly the same height with them both sitting down, but James was still tucked under Michael’s arm. “You teach mechanics and Force manipulation, and you don’t run around solving trade disputes or ending wars, but…you knew how I was going to feel. You’re beyond good with the first-year trainees. And you know me. Better than anyone.”   
  
And Michael, who’d never been much good at outright denials, who wasn’t going to and literally couldn’t and anyway _wouldn’t_ lie to James, said, “Patrick and Ian know. That was partly why me. For you. Um. I’m sorry.”   
  
“Why? That explains a lot, actually. You don’t get the…immediacy of it, the way I do, but…” James waved a hand, an expressive abstract gesture. “You get people. Motivation. The sort of underpinnings. No wonder they don’t advertise you.”   
  
“They don’t advertise me,” Michael said, and sighed, “because it isn’t reliable. I have to have…someone open enough on the other side. To kind of listen to. I can hear the—the words in the spaces, sometimes. But I need someone else to start the conversation.”   
  
James put his head on one side. Grinned. A real grin: conspiratorial, excited, not unthinkingly seductive or impish or actor-practiced. “And I can talk to anyone.”   
  
“Yes…you can…”   
  
“I’m thinking we should eavesdrop on our beloved Heads, aren’t you? If they’re going to have plans for us, I want to know.”   
  
“That’s…sort of unethical…please don’t be evil…I do trust them. So do you.”   
  
“Of course, but I still want to know. And you do, too.” James’s smile lit up the snow-pale room. “Besides, I’m a witch, remember?—come on, you have to expect me to break _some_ rules.”   
  
“Don’t,” Michael said, swift and inadvertent, stepping over the last few words. “You’re not—you don’t have to call yourself that. You know I don’t think that. About you.”   
  
This got a rather surprised expression, smile startled into pensive reflection and then back out. “I know. But I _have_ heard all the jokes. People—”   
  
“Someone _said_ something—?”   
  
“Oh, not at all, no one even knows except you and Patrick and Ian, I think. Which is why I get to hear the jokes. How many Nightsisters does it take to change a holoprojector bulb?”   
  
“James—”   
  
“None. They enslave an engineer to do it and then feed him to a rancor.” James made an I-know-it’s-not-funny-but-if-I-can’t-who-can? face at Michael’s expression. “I heard that one back when I got my first job. Being a glorious martyr in one of those Galactic Civil War epic period holodramas. I didn’t exactly go around shouting my heritage to the ’net, you understand. Look, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re not wrong, but I can’t just…be angry all the time, either. I mean literally. Being me. I _can’t_.”   
  
“You still shouldn’t have to hear that.” He slid his hand up without conscious thought to cup James’s face, thumb rubbing across rueful freckles. Not strange, somehow, that gesture. Not on either side. “I’m sorry.”   
  
“No,” James said, and Michael stopped, thought, sighed, skimmed a thumb over the arch of his apprentice’s cheekbone, and answered, “No. You know what I mean.”   
  
“We’re already changing things.” Certainty in the New Glasgow hills. One corner of that mobile mouth tugging up. “Ian does want me to announce it, after I successfully graduate. Sort of a symbol. Witches can be Jedi. For that matter, witches can have grandsons. I don’t mind being a symbol if it’ll help, and, hey, some of the jokes _are_ kind of funny, remind me to tell you the one about the two witches and the one broomstick. Which, by the way, still works even if one of the witches happens to be physically male. I should know.”   
  
Michael’d had a retort ready. It was gone. Irrevocably. Just like that.   
  
“You said you can hear the spaces,” James said, very softly, playful and serious as the sea, splashing waves over deep blue fathoms below. “So you know what I mean, too.”   
  
“I think so.” He stroked the hand through James’s hair; tucked the corresponding little sigh of pleasure away carefully into his heart. “Yes. All right. I haven’t actually heard that broomstick one. You can, y’know, tell it to me later if you still want to. Right now you should rest. I’ll go find the kitchens and herbal tea and nerf stew. _After_ you’re in bed.” He was fairly sure, from the revealing sentences, the unusually clumsy admissions, the weary dwindling shared headache, that James wasn’t back to one hundred percent. Better, yes. But not altogether so.   
  
And he was still stroking fingers through dark hair, and James was letting him.   
  
Matchless eyes widened hopefully at him. “Can I bargain for honey-sticks if I don’t argue?”   
  
“Terrible influence, you are.” Testing, teasing; he caught answering laughter among sea-tides. “I’ll see what I can do. And…yes. About your other idea. Not now, not any time soon, but yes. I don’t like being in the dark any more than you do. And it’s about both of us. So if you’re going to try to find out I’m right there with you.”   
  
I’m with you no matter what, he didn’t say. He thought maybe James heard it anyway, from the smile.


	4. he will learn patience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michael gets to take care of James, and James falls asleep on Michael's sofa.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry if this one feels short! It was the first half of the next chapter for AGES, but I finally cut it in half so as to give you all something. The next chapter begins the following morning, I'll say that. :-)

In the wake of that sunwashed numinous afternoon, Michael felt as if something ought to change. He wasn’t certain what. But something. The world had shifted. Grown closer and larger simultaneously. Himself and James, together.  
  
But that proved…not to be the case, or not exactly. The connection was present. And it was true. He found himself glancing up at the same moments James did, their eyes meeting; he absentmindedly picked up an extra sticky-bun at breakfast and James appeared beside him to collect it from his hand. James turned up outside his door with a brilliant smile and a bottle of Corellian firewhiskey and classic holovid episodes of the adventures of Wraith Squadron, and knew all the trivia about the actors and their characters, and made Michael laugh out loud with his Ewok pilot impersonation.  
  
James also did not get hungover in the slightest, a fact which caused Michael to glare at his apprentice for half the morning. James smiled at him angelically, and then empathically reached over and collected all of Michael’s throbbing headache and replaced it with wonderful mint-scented numbing coolness. Incredible.  
  
The nighttime sessions became, if not constant, more frequent than not. They both liked science-fiction and Old Earth Shakespeare. They both liked cooking, even given the limitations of Academy-quarters personal kitchens, and Michael discovered that James was better with pastries than he was, and demanded a step-by-step demonstration of vanilla-sunberry cream cakes. James obliged, eyes sparkling, in exchange for Michael’s roasted range-squab in golden pear-fruit sauce recipe, and then licked cream off a fingertip, taste-testing.  
  
James let him work on the _Lady Charlie_ ’s finicky stabilizers, an act of trust that shocked Michael down to his bones. James glanced at him, smiling enigmatically; said, “Well, I’m pretty certain you don’t want me falling out of hyperspace into a black hole, and anyway your skyhopper says you know what you’re doing,” and Michael wondered momentarily whether his apprentice simply meant the apparent attention to detail or whether James really could talk to everything in every universe. Spaceships and skyhoppers probably _would_ open up to those blue eyes. Just to make them pleased.  
  
James fell into step with him while walking to the hangar bay, and then handed over tools before Michael could ask for them. Four hands, one shared thought, private delight. Easy.  
  
Other parts weren’t so easy. Not at all.  
  
He’d expressly forbidden James from attempting any sort of investigations into secret plans for at least a week. James had regarded this order with a mixture of annoyance, cheerfulness, and surprise, though the last seemed somewhat self-directed.  
  
“Are you sure? Because I’m fine, really, I know what I did, it wasn’t even anything I did wrong, I just didn’t have boundaries set, I can—”  
  
“No.”  
  
“I thought you wanted to know.”  
  
“I do.” Because he could, because he meant it, he added, “But we do it when I say it’s the right time, and when I think you’re feeling up to it, James,” and then was mildly astonished at his own tone of command.  
  
But he did mean it. James was _his_. His apprentice. His to protect. Not his property, of course not, not in any way; but some primal piece of his heart woke up at the pronoun and the possessiveness, dark and desirous and _wanting._  
  
James blinked, eyelashes sweeping lightly down and up. “Yes, sir.”  
  
“Oh _fuck_ —sorry, sorry, you heard—”  
  
“I did.” James blinked again, looking rather startled. “I said it because you were thinking it but—I think I liked it. Or I’m losing boundaries—headache, sorry, sir—but I’m pretty sure that’s not it, because I’m still thinking about it, and I still like it.”  
  
“We’re not doing this now,” Michael said desperately, for both their sakes, “we’re not, James, you’re recovering and I’m responsible for you and—and why’re you even here, you should be in bed, not bringing me morning caffeine, it’s only been a day, at least go sit down.”  
  
James looked at him with rather complicated eyes. Emotions Michael couldn’t even begin to name. Swirls and eddies in ocean-planet tides. “I did tell you I recuperate quickly.”  
  
“You also said headache, just now.”  
  
“Less than yesterday,” James said, and Michael opened his mouth to yell at him about his own welfare and people who’d care if he got hurt, and then got interrupted by his morning students showing up in annoyingly prompt cheerful groups of twos and threes, coming through the door.  
  
James grinned at him, smiled at the younglings, and did sit down in the back. For approximately five nanoseconds. And then got up and helped Amee and her partner re-wire a scout-ship navigational panel using only Force-assisted visualization and telekinesis. And _then_ had the temerity to send a tiny mental wave directly into Michael’s brain, via that persistent dwindling never-quite-released lifeline.  
  
Michael glared. Wanted to slap back the happy waving intangible fingers until they stopped exerting themselves. Didn’t. Couldn’t risk more hurt.  
  
He thought he felt James smile, not teasing but strangely wistful, in reply.  
  
The connection faded. Almost non-existent. He’d not done that. James must have. He wondered why. He nearly asked. But James must have reasons. Maybe simply keeping the link in place was too much effort. Maybe James didn’t want to accidentally let the headache spill over. Maybe, maybe.  
  
He didn’t ask why, though he did come over as the students filed out, and put a hand on that shorter shoulder and say, “Are you, y’know, okay?”  
  
James gave him another smile. “Fine.”  
  
“Are…we…okay?”  
  
“Oh,” James said, surprised, almost as surprised as Michael that those words’d come out, “yes, sorry,” and a pulse of soft bonfire heat glowed between them for an instant, hanging in the Force. “Yes. You do hear what I don’t say, don’t you…”  
  
“When you let me. Are you sure? Did I say something that—if I did I’m sorry.”  
  
James shook his head, but with a more genuine smile, lightness coming up behind the crumpled seas. “No. Not you. All me, this one. Can we go play with the sculptures today? I’ll let you watch when I set limits, even.”  
  
“I know when you’re trying to reassure me, James.”  
  
“Yes, sir. Is it working?”  
  
Michael sighed, because it was, and they both knew it. “You’re using the biggest one today.” The easiest one to manipulate, to see. “And you stop as soon as I say stop. Clear?”  
  
“Yes. The biggest one, seriously?”  
  
“Whatever joke you’re thinking of,” Michael attempted, “I have to use those as training aids, so don’t say it, please don’t say it—”  
  
“Clearly,” James mused, “size does matter, sir,” and Michael telekinetically threw a hydrospanner at him, not aiming properly out of lingering concern.  
  
James threw it right back, no hesitation at all. And then ducked out the door and made Michael chase him down the hall.  
  
And somewhere in between the laughter and the decidedly adult-rated sand-sculptures that briefly spun into existence in crystal globes—Michael was completely certain this was purely on his behalf, since once James stopped teasing him the sand turned into delicate intricate miniature palaces and famous Civil War landmarks and even an exquisitely detailed copy of _Lady Charlie_ sitting in her hangar bay—Michael found himself, yes, reassured.  
  
This contented state of affairs lasted all of three nights. The fourth morning James appeared not late but later than normal. Moving somewhat gingerly. Standing not ungracefully, but certainly less so than usual. Even—Michael narrowed eyes—limping?  
  
They were already starting class; he reached out wordlessly, inquiring, concerned. James physically jumped. And then blushed. And the wave of emotion, too quick to read, felt like embarrassment and physical stretches and sweet rough satiation and fulfilled desire and—not _quite_ fulfilled desire, what—  
  
_Oh fuck I’m sorry!_ James yelped, and slammed all the mental doors. Michael winced, though the sensation was mostly lost amid the comprehension and mortification and, fuck, jealousy, he _knew_ it was, and it burned—  
  
_I’m so sorry,_ James muttered again, not looking at him. The blush remained visible, though, staining what could be seen of one cheekbone.  
  
Michael flailed for a moment, clutched at responsibility as a lifeline even while his heart ached, and managed, _you—it’s none of my business but you—that last—are you—_  
  
_I’m fine I’m fine I’m fine stop talking about this now!_  
  
Michael hesitated. James was clearly lying—that unfulfilled bittersweetness shouted as much, not pain but a kind of unspoken accepted melancholy, heart-wound carried with a smile, love-letter unsent and refolded into creases like so many times before—but James didn’t seem _hurt_ as such, or at least had no regrets about being so.  
  
_I’m really all right,_ James said, and sighed. Out loud, gently corrected one of the Tatooine farmers’ sons from completing a circuit that would’ve made the whole board erupt in flames with a hasty, “Gavin, that’s red, not green, drop it now, please—”  
  
Gavin did. James said, “Nice levitation, though, you’ve done that without even a gesture, that’s very much impressive, I sometimes still can’t,” and added privately _, look, half of that’s from three sparring rounds with Nicholas in one of the training rooms after hours anyway, at least the knee is, and it’s my fault, I tripped over myself, don’t worry, all right?_  
  
Half, Michael thought, and grumbled inarticulate words about after-hours training and being careful and wrapping that bruised knee more securely. He let James hear those. Didn’t let James hear the plans he was making to talk to young Nicholas. The boy should know better.  
  
The boy probably did know better. Michael’d be willing to bet his own personal skyhopper on which one of the two had been the instigator, and it wasn’t the one who’d been at the Academy for six years.  
  
_I’ll let you help with the knee,_ James said with surprising meekness, and stopped Gavin from telekinetically attempting to blow up the classroom for the third time that morning. _Sorry, Michael._  
  
This time Michael was the one who sighed. And he took the jealousy and smothered it under concern both professional, as a Master with a wayward apprentice, and personal, as one friend to another. And he found that medical kit again, and bandaged James up _again_ , and tried not to hear his heart whimper as his fingers trailed over pale skin and profusions of freckles and sturdy muscles.  
  
He sent James off to work with Patrick. Patrick, five minutes later, shouted into Michael’s brain, _Don’t break your apprentice, young man!_  
  
_I didn’t do it!_ Michael snarled back, _he only half the time listens to me, and the rest of the time he’s either better than me or talking final-year students into extra physical training in a room that’s supposed to be locked for the night!_  
  
_Shouldn’t you be there?_  
  
_I would if he’d tell me these things! Or if you would! And what AREN’T you telling us, again!_  
  
_Not yet,_ Patrick retorted, _patience is an admirable quality, you understand,_ and went conclusively back to whatever testing-of-limits he’d designed for James that afternoon. Michael stared at the closest student desk until it started to shudder in place, and then stopped venting his myriad frustrations on the hapless furnishings and went off to practice lightsaber forms with a practice remote. He felt like swatting things. Even if the things were only lasers. The outlet helped.  
  
Several hours later, he was sweat-damp, worn-out, breathing hard, and somewhat calmer. To a degree. The sheer physicality of the motion, the focus, the test of his ability to predict and deflect, had lifted some weight, if not all. He was good with a lightsaber, always had been, tall and fast and adaptable. He’d lost himself for a while in the simple drift of action, the split-second tug and quiver of the Force, temporal ripples spreading out before and after each laser-shot. He’d not missed one.  
  
He still didn’t know what he was going to do, about himself and his jealousy, about his apprentice and those unfairly muscular thighs, about Patrick and Ian and whatever secrets might be lurking. But he’d beaten every programmed routine in the remote. That felt good. Like accomplishment, anyway. And tomorrow might be a new day.  
  
He shuffled back to his quarters, and found himself entirely unsurprised to discover his apprentice there, yawning, propped against the door, holding a plate of what Michael’s weary taste buds wanted very much to be a shaak-meat and cheese sandwich. James’s eyes were only about half-open, and he tried to stand up when Michael emerged from the lift but ended up slumped back against the door. Even his hair looked flattened by tiredness.  
  
“Hey,” Michael said, and James yawned again and said, “It is, I mean the food, I could feel you being hungry from my room, let me in before I fall over.” Michael levitated the plate out of his hand and said, “Absolutely yes, no falling over, I’d catch you anyway,” and when he came out of the shower James was asleep on the low sofa under the window, one hand tucked under his cheek, one long leg dangling to the floor.  
  
Michael sat down on the rug near his head, leaning against the sofa-arm. James woke up long enough to crack an eye open and murmur, “Patrick wanted me to reach the Outer Rim worlds, this afternoon…” and one hand made a vague gesture in the direction of a quarter-piece of sandwich. Michael handed it over, and their fingers met. He tipped his head back against the furniture, while James picked at bites.  
  
The Outer Rim. The edge of known space. He was fairly certain Ian and Patrick couldn’t do that. He himself _definitely_ couldn’t do that.  
  
“What did he want you to try to do?”  
  
“Oh, not try.” James, even half-asleep, displayed a cheeky grin. “I did. We found the final lost Outbound Flight ship from last century. They say hello.”  
  
Michael twisted around to stare at him, a maneuver which, through the muscle exhaustion and shock, meant that he almost went sprawling. Thank the Force he was already sitting on his floor.  
  
“You…what?” No one’d been able to track that last exploratory ship. They’d lost communications over two hundred years ago. Beyond known space. Beyond any transmissions.  
  
Until now.  
  
“You what,” he said again. James made a sound someplace between a pained wince and a huff of amusement. “They weren’t that hard to pick out, it was just keeping the link up…those emotions have a very particular shape, that many people having the same general…” A handwave, forgotten sandwich adding emphasis to exuberant fingers.  
  
“They thought they’d been forgotten, they were resigned, but they didn’t regret it, either…a whole ship full of explorers, and the grandchildren of explorers…lovely, really…I’m awfully tired, though, felt like I was shouting the whole time just to get the faintest impressions through. And I couldn’t pick up proper coordinates. I tried to triangulate. Wherever I could feel life around them. Patrick seemed very excited; at least, someone went running off to the Senate chamber, I saw that before I passed out…”  
  
“You what!” His entire vocabulary, down to two words. He was up on both knees, fingers catching James’s face, lifting that chin, resting over the fluttering pulse in one temple. James burrowed into his hand, with a sigh. “That feels marvelous…sorry, I don’t mean I ended up flat on my back in sickbay, I just got dizzy for a minute. Kind of blurry. All the edges of things. I’m okay.”  
  
“What the fuck,” Michael said, and got up and found juice and honey-sticks, a bit helplessly. Sugar would help. Had to.  
  
The honey-sticks were left over from two nights ago. When James had been sitting on his sofa, laughing, companionably shouting at holographic podraces with him.  
  
His hand shook very slightly, bringing them over.  
  
“You didn’t tell me.” He’d’ve been there. He’d’ve wanted to be. Demanded to be. He suspected that was why he’d not been told.  
  
He was going to have _words_ with his Academy Heads. Physical ones if need be. But not now. Tomorrow.  
  
James needed him now.  
  
“Oh, perfect, thank you—well, I didn’t exactly expect it. I didn’t expect to be able to reach that far at all, but I could, and then I didn’t want to let go…I really am okay. I told you. Extraordinary recuperative powers. Also Ian and Patrick made me sit down and eat chocolate _and_ get a med-scanner waved over my head.” One more yawn. “I might need to stay here and not move. On your sofa. Sorry, sir…”  
  
“Hey,” Michael said, and held a piece of sandwich to bright lips—James needed protein as well as quick energy—until they quirked upwards and nibbled bread and meat out of his fingers. “Didn’t I ask you to use my name? And yes. Take the bed, if you want.” Take anything you want, he thought. From me.  
  
He was in love, after all. Head over heels, irrevocably, unbelievably, in love.  
  
James was a miracle. Found lost children on the other side of the galaxy. And then felt Michael’s weary frustration and showed up at his door with a sandwich.  
  
And was inelegantly and very ordinarily flopped across Michael’s sofa, a tiny bit of blood and bone and heart and inconceivable power.  
  
“This is fine,” James mumbled, eyes half-closed, contentment nestling like a drowsy owl into Michael’s mind and heart. Michael fed him a bit of crystallized honey next. And James smiled.  
  
He plucked the top blanket off his bed with a thought. Draped it over his apprentice. After a moment’s thought, grabbed the second one for himself. And sat there on the floor, alternately feeding James and himself, concern and love and longing tangled up inside him so profoundly that he wondered whether James could feel it spilling out with every gesture, every whisper of tongue and lips against his thumb and fingertips.  
  
James, nearly gone, murmured back not a word but ripple of acceptance, a serene wash of rainbowed _yes_ and _this_ and _feels good;_ Michael’s breath snagged in his lungs, invisible tenterhooks of hope and desire.  
  
James fell asleep between the inhale and exhale. Michael sat beside him, honey on his fingertips and the second blanket coiled around his shoulders, and found himself grinning at the last bite of the sandwich. It grinned back triumphantly. They’d fed James.


	5. always in motion is the future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Michael has a visitor, James has a career, and Michael has an idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...yes, there're seven chapters now. That should be it. I hope. I mean, I've got an _outline_... *plaintive expression*

James was still asleep the following morning, when Michael staggered out of bed with hair standing up in impossible directions and pillow-lines on his face. He spared a moment to be grateful about this, and then another tiny moment to be regretful about the fact that a sleeping James couldn’t bring him morning caf.  
  
He’d been getting used to that. Routine. Shared.  
  
James, he thought, and poked vicious intangible fingers in the direction of his Heads’ bedroom. Patrick answered, surprisingly meek. _We’re very sorry about yesterday. We asked whether he wanted to stop. He said no._  
  
 _You know better._  
  
 _We do. How is he?_  
  
 _Hurt._  
  
 _Oh—not—not badly—_  
  
Not for lack of meddling. But Patrick’s contrition felt genuine and unhappy. Michael relented. _He’s doing better. Asleep. You should’ve called me._  
  
 _Ian did offer. He said he’d be all right. He said he’d tell you himself. I take it he did?_  
  
 _Tell me what you need him to do._  
  
 _It’s not…_ Patrick sighed. _We need both of you, in fact. We’ve only been pushing him because he’ll have to carry more of the work. But he’ll need you to carry him._  
  
 _Of course,_ Michael snapped. _But for WHAT._  
  
 _We’ll tell you both. As soon as he’s recovered. That’s a promise, my dear, I swear to you. And we wouldn’t ask anything of you that you wouldn’t be willing to do. By the way, he may be receiving a medal of some sort from the Senate. For finding their lost ship. Do let him know?_  
  
Michael closed his eyes again, as the connection dwindled. Stared at the blank darkness behind his eyelids for a while. Then he thought again: James, exhausted, asleep, possibly needing him; and he pulled on the first set of decent robes at hand and ventured into the other room and then stopped, slowly, not quite of his own volition.   
  
James, asleep. James, asleep, bathed in morning sunlight.   
  
James asleep, curled under the spare blanket on the low sofa, cheek pillowed on one hand, long eyelashes brushing pale skin, hair looping over the visible ear.  
  
James asleep was impossibly lovely, some glowing sculpture woven out of the Force, out of star-stuff and energy, out of power and dreams and kindness. The sunbeams painted light across the standard-issue beige of the sofa, and the line of his cheek. Picked out freckles and fairness. Shone over all the colors of him, dark hair and bright lips and blue blanket framed by mundane furniture. Couldn’t highlight all the fantastical strength, everything James had done the night before, but they didn’t have to. Michael knew.  
  
The emotion wrapped his heart in gold. Caught in his throat. No words.  
  
James made a sleepy-kitten sound, scrunching eyes closed against the most persistent sunbeam. His fingers curled in, resisting awakening. Michael’s heart turned over in place.  
  
James yawned. Opened one eye. Then sat bolt upright, or attempted to. The attempt ended with a flop back across the sofa and a simultaneous wince from both of them. “Sorry…”  
  
“Don’t.” He came over. Perched gingerly on the miniscule edge of cushion available; James tried to scoot toward the back to make room. Michael put a hand on his head, unthinking, instinctive. “Still that bad?”  
  
“Mostly tired now.” Another yawn, hidden with the back of one hand, not helping the kitten comparison. “You can feel that. Just no energy. Not in pain, though…”  
  
“Stay here.” Michael touched his hair again. Fingers, stroking. “Don’t get up for the morning class. You don’t need to, anyway, I managed without you for over a year, you know.”  
  
“Oh, fine…” James closed his eyes. Tilted his head further into the petting. “I see how it is. You want a day without me correcting your trivia about Corellian light freighter top speeds.”  
  
“Ah, you’ve caught me.” He tucked a flyaway wave behind James’s ear. That had in fact happened, two days ago: James looking up from the back of the classroom, laughing: _you know even the Civil War era models could make point six past lightspeed, don’t tell them that’s a recent invention, what if they have to fly antiques?_   
  
He was in fact worried. James hadn’t argued, just now, about remaining on his sofa.  
  
“I can come back and check on you, around lunch. If you don’t want to get up. By the way, Patrick says you might be getting a medal. For the rescue. Congratulations.” He almost didn’t get out the last word. Images of James wavering on unsteady feet, sea-spray eyes clouding over…  
  
“I can’t stay in your rooms all day.” James didn’t appear particularly disposed to move. “Everyone’ll wonder what you’ve done with me. I’ll come find you after class. Unless you do want me there; I can manage being upright, and your students might ask…a medal, seriously, all I did was listen. Very hard, granted.”  
  
“I want you to rest,” Michael said, and let fingertips linger over the pulse-beat in his throat: testing, reassuring, anchoring. “If they ask, I’ll tell them you got hurt practicing Endorian vine-swinging challenges, okay?”  
  
“At least go with zero-gravity mini-speederbike races. Much more impressive. Also something I’d actually know how to do.”  
  
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He touched James’s cheek, just because. “If you need anything…”  
  
“I’ll shout. Go on, you’ll be late.”  
  
“Don’t strain yourself.” Time to go, time to go, he already wouldn’t have a spare minute to eat, he’d have to grab a starfruit or something along the way. He really should be getting up. “Use an actual comlink. Not your head.”  
  
James reached up, very casually, and put his hand over Michael’s where it’d paused, tracing his jaw. Those fingers felt firm and warm over his. “Compromise? Because I honestly might forget. Too easy, with you. But if it hurts, even a little, I’ll stop. Also, can I use your shower? I miss mine. Hot water—did you just mentally compare me to a Fresian fishing-cat?”  
  
“Little bit. Don’t eavesdrop, either. Yes, you can.” Yes anything. Everything, with James holding his hand and smiling.  
  
“Don’t be surprised when I leave a headless fish in your bed later, then. You completely are going to be late. Go.”  
  
“Taking orders from my apprentice,” Michael sighed, “yes, sir, James,” and tore himself away and headed for the door.  
  
“Wait!”  
  
He paused.  
  
James sat up on one elbow. Flicked fingers. The topmost piece of starfruit leapt out of the kitchen and through the living space and directly into Michael’s uplifted hand. “Now go.”  
  
Michael saluted, fruit in one hand, and went. Heard the indistinct telepathic grumblings about Masters who needed to take proper care of themselves in the mornings and at least James was here to make sure he ate and got caffeine, plus a brief flicker of an image that’d _never_ happened, James waiting when he got home, turning and smiling with mint-leaf hot chocolate in one hand, wearing Michael’s robes over nothing at all—  
  
He dropped the fruit. Barely caught it before it hit the lift floor.  
  
James wanted—James wanted to—  
  
That image’d felt like _home._  
  
That image also meant that James wasn’t well. No control. Desires that he’d never consciously shared escaping.  
  
He muttered several curses. Fortunately the only listeners were the lift’s walls. They might blush, but they’d not tell.  
  
He’d just…have to act as if he’d not seen it. James hadn’t chosen to tell him. Inadvertent, accidental. Michael needed to respect that. Needed to respect James making that choice.  
  
Okay. He could do that. He would.  
  
And, having settled on that course of action, he spent the entire morning imagining futures, in his head.   
  
James coming home to him. James cooking with him, side by side. James making faces at his own terrible movies across a bowl of popped buttered grains. James meeting Michael’s parents, smiling, making them smile.  
  
James being a hero, rescuing lost ships and saving the world. Michael there to catch him and bring him home.   
  
James in his bed. In _their_ bed. Not in anyone else’s, not with anyone who’d be cruel to him, who’d consume his kindness and leave him unsatisfied; Michael would never do that, would never use him that way, would love him, every inch of him, and take him apart until he was trembling with bliss, his own and no one else’s…  
  
James healed pain. James healed pain, sometimes, with sex. Michael knew that. Knew that James might not even conceive of fidelity in the same way: James would always, always, feel whatever anyone needed, and would try to offer it; would have to offer it, really, or be lost in overheard anguish.  
  
He knew himself well enough to know he’d hate the thought of sharing James.   
  
He absentmindedly fixed young Gavin’s circuit board for the third time. The students had been concerned. Had, when informed that James was sick, collectively decided to send him get-well messages, in the form of an Academy protocol droid, physically Force-summoned, programmed with a cheerfully garbled babble of shouting, and then levitated out the door.  
  
He would hate the thought of sharing James, but he would hate not having James at all even more. And James would come home to him. James wanted to come home to him; the accidental vision’d sung with that desire, like leaping hearth-flames.  
  
And then he shook his head, though only mentally. He might’ve made a decision—he _had_ made a decision—but James hadn’t. And for now, until Patrick and Ian decided otherwise, he was responsible for James. He was the Master; James might be older than the standard apprentice, might already be of consenting age, but was his junior in experience and rank. Wouldn’t be right. Wouldn’t feel right, and that mattered.  
  
He wanted James to feel right. To smile and throw starfruit at him and maybe call him sir once in a while not because it was required but because they both enjoyed the sound.  
  
He sighed. As inconspicuously as he could, checked the clock. Twenty minutes left.   
  
He knew that James had gone back to sleep, after a quick half-awake burst of pleased gratitude at the arrival of the message from their class. He could tell as much; that drowsing unaware little scrap of silver-blue thread lay quiescent in a corner of his mind. He could follow it without trying. Because James had left the link in place, because James trusted him not to tug. This also meant James, sleeping, was hearing none of those thoughts, other than perhaps as free-floating unremarked dreams.  
  
Ten minutes. He could run back up to his quarters after class and sit back down on the floor by the sofa; he could make lunch if James wanted food, and he could catch up on student messages and the note from his mother he’d been meaning to answer about visiting the capitol next month. He could be quiet, and James could rest, and maybe Michael could reach up after a few minutes and hold one freckled hand.  
  
Five minutes. He told the students as much. Half of them were fidgeting anyway.  
  
And then James woke up. Not of his own volition. Startled.  
  
Michael caught his balance with one hand on his desk. Struggled not to shout—the headache seemed to be gone, but he didn’t want any further stress that might make it return—and pushed inarticulate inquiry that way.  
  
 _I’m fine._ Prompt and clear and unhurt, if sleep-fuzzy; Michael’s heart thumped away in dizzy relief. _It’s just your door, someone’s here, d’you want me to answer it?_  
  
Who in space would be at his door at this hour? Any of the regular instructors knew the schedule; he’d not been expecting visitors; the Force wasn’t tingling with danger…  
  
 _Oh, hang on…_ James sounded distracted. _He knows you’re not here. He knows you. He wants to talk to me._  
  
 _He WHAT?_  
  
 _Relax, sir…as far as I can tell he doesn’t mean any harm…though he does seem a bit upset over something, and it’s to do with me…sorry, I am still a bit tired, I’m having trouble with both this and reading him, let me go see what he wants and I’ll be back in half a sec—_  
  
 _James, don’t—!_  
  
Too late. Back to only the simple dangling thread-end, present but unfocused. Michael clung to his desk, tried not to panic—no harm intended, James’d said, but James was tired and tired enough to admit it and using those overextended abilities—and let his students go three minutes early and quivered with the need to sprint upstairs.  
  
 _No, it’s okay._ James came back a bit breathless and lovely, a cascade of amusement and comprehension and pain-tinged pensiveness. _We’re okay. He’s a friend of yours—Steve—I sent him down to see you for lunch. Go ahead; he wants to talk to you and I’m not hungry. I have got a few messages to answer, in any case; mind if I use your terminal?_  
  
 _Are you all right?_ The pain wasn’t strong, but present, embers like the memory of overexertion. James was thinking words very precisely, shaping them with effort out of the clouds of disparate emotion. _I can send him away and come up to see you._  
  
And in the wake of that reply, he realized: Steve. His Steve. Whom he’d not seen for months. He ought to be overjoyed, and he was; but his heart was up there bundled beneath heavy blankets on a sofa.  
  
He got the impression of a watercolor headshake, blurred as chalk under rain, at that. _You miss him. I’ll be here when you’re done. And I do need to sort this out, it’s important…_  
  
 _Important?_  
  
 _Tell you when you get here. Promise, sir._ A sun-flare smile. _Might involve you anyway, if you’d like._  
  
Michael, torn between immediate exhilarated wanting to know and the fear of hurting that brilliant mind even more, gave up. _As soon as I get there. Now stop talking._  
  
James flung a salute his way, a faded teasing reiteration of Michael’s earlier gesture, and eased back out of the verbal connection, leaving the now-familiar shining coil of silver-blue at the back of his mind.  
  
Michael belatedly pried his hands away from his desk. Remembered to breathe.   
  
And then there was a knock at the frame of the classroom door. When he looked up, the Force hummed with the presence of Steve’s grin.  
  
“My favorite apprentice,” Steve said, a mountain of flowing Jedi robes and dark skin and imposing muscles, authority undermined not in the slightest by the huge smile and spread arms.  
  
“Never your apprentice,” Michael said, “technically,” and then stood up and let himself be hugged. Felt good. The way Steve finding him had felt good, in his parents’ restaurant, drifting and Force-strong and untrained and lonely. He held on for maybe a few seconds too long, just because the support felt too damn welcome.  
  
“Right,” Steve said, “so I’ve just collected a potential Chadra-Fan trainee, she’s pretty impressive with plants, I’ve handed her off to Ian, so take me to lunch and tell me about yours,” and Michael wanted to cry a little, from the sheer unexpected relief of having a _friend_ , but pulled himself together enough to grumble, “Didn’t you just meet him?”  
  
“Yep. In your quarters, I might add. You want to tell me what’s going on there?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“Yes you do. Over dewback steak and good brandy. Come on…” Steve put a hand on his shoulder. Towed him out of the classroom and out of the Academy altogether and off to an expensive discreet wood-paneled restaurant with false windows showing not the endless city traffic but imagined vistas of snowscapes, towering forests, golden sands. Michael attempted to argue—away from the Academy, out of shouting distance, what if James tried to reach him, what if James could reach him and hurt himself trying? He didn’t get the words into any semblance of order before Steve shook his head.  
  
“If you’re going to say you can’t leave, he said you’d say that, and he said go. And you trust him, and you trust me. Come on.”  
  
“But,” Michael said, and forlornly trailed his mentor into the best booth in the place. “I mean—I sort of—you know, I need to—I _want_ to—”  
  
“Yeah, and we need to talk about that.” Steve paused to order for them both, and then looked at him, eyes serious. “I know I don’t see you enough, but you know I love you, right? Not the same way you love your new apprentice, ’cause frankly I don’t want to picture you naked, but I thought you could do just about anything when I first picked you up, and I’m never wrong, okay?”  
  
Michael opened his mouth.  
  
“Don’t talk about the six dancing girls and the firewhiskey, kid.”  
  
“Then…no, you’re not usually wrong.” He sighed. Stared at his plate as it arrived, thick and hearty and perfectly cooked. “I don’t know what to do. I’m sort of in love with him. And he’s…you’ve met him. Why did you, y’know…”  
  
“Want to meet him first? Because I wanted to see the hot new trainee everyone’s been fussing over, and I knew you were assigned as his Master, and I know you.” Steve pointed a fork at him accusingly. “You like people who’re good at what they do. Who make you laugh. Who don’t get easily scared. And this kid, he’s an empath, for fuck’s sake. And he was an actor before this. He can be anything you want. You know that, too.”  
  
“I know.” The steak sat on his plate. Sizzled. Michael couldn’t bring himself to taste it. “I know. But…”   
  
“But you love him.” Steve stole a turquoise potato from Michael’s plate. Popped it into his mouth. “Let’s pretend for a second that I actually am the senior Jedi Knight here and one with decades of experience on you, okay? You trust me on this?”  
  
Michael looked up. “Yes.” And then, very very quietly, shocked at himself: “But sort of no. I mean. You’re right. He could be—he could be anything. But I’m not bad at emotions either. And I know him. He wouldn’t—” James on his sofa, James catching the backlash for both of them in the puzzle-room, James so surprised when Michael wouldn’t act on simple physical urges to bury himself in that perfect mouth.   
  
“—he wouldn’t do that. _I_ want this. Me. And I’m the one who’s been saying no. He could make me say yes. He won’t.”  
  
“He could make _you_ say yes.” Steve’s eyes went meditative, processing this new information. “He’s that good. _You’re_ good.”  
  
“He’s better,” Michael said, still quiet, and cut off a bite of steak just to have something to do with his hands. “And I do trust you. I also trust him. So if you’re going to tell me not to, just—don’t. Don’t even try.”  
  
“Well, in that case.” Steve grinned. “I have a present for you, then.”  
  
“You…what?”  
  
“You’ll like this one.”  
  
“It’s not another orphaned baby tauntaun, is it?”   
  
“Hardly, and your parents named her Tessie, as I recall. Still about your problem child. I just wanted to see what you’d say, first.”  
  
“What,” Michael said, now hopelessly confused, and finally put the bite in his mouth.   
  
“He’s not sleeping with anyone at the Academy,” Steve announced. Michael choked on dewback.  
  
“How—what—how do you even—how do you know?”  
  
“Because he’s not. Come on, I know you were taught better than that. Look at the way he acts with everyone. Listen. The undercurrents. He would say yes, and they’d like to, all of them, but he’s not following through. He leaves them all feeling beautiful, though. Feeling important. Gets them to believe they are.” Steve consumed a bite of steak. “He’s damn good, you know.”  
  
“He is,” Michael said. “He’s incredible. Are you—are you sure?” He meant: how did you see that, how did you see that when I didn’t, how can you be so convinced, and if you are that convinced do you know _why_ he’s not?  
  
“You’ve got it bad,” Steve said happily, and attacked the dewback again. “It’s wonderful. Spectator sport.  I asked him.”  
  
“You _what?!”_  
  
“Asked him. Look, I know how easy it is for an untrained sex-on-legs empath to fuck everyone’s lives  up—” There was a story there. Michael knew most of it. Not all. “—and I knew he was your apprentice, so I asked him, straight up, the way you should’ve done. And he said no.”  
  
“Oh seven hells,” Michael said. “All of the hells. Ever. Why.”  
  
“Why didn’t you ask? No clue. You’re a moron. Why is he behaving himself? Because he’s a decent person, and he knows as well as anyone that sex leads to emotion, including from people not necessarily having the sex, and emotion bleeds. And because he’s in love with you. You should see his eyes light up when he talks about you.”  
  
Michael opened his mouth to say something about emotion and containment and James having practice with that, and then the last two sentences wrote themselves in white-hot fire across his brain and for good measure a few places lower down, and all the words went away and hid.  
  
“I like him,” Steve added, and claimed another one of Michael’s potatoes. “If you were going to fall in love with an apprentice, at least you picked a good one.”  
  
“You…think he’s in love with…me.”  
  
“He _is_ in love with you. He thinks you aren’t in love with him, which I have to say, for an empath, that’s kind of impressively wrong. He said that you want him, and that you like him, and that you’ve been a good friend, so I’m really kind of wondering how you’ve managed to fuck this one up so badly your own emotionally gifted apprentice can’t tell any different. He smiled at me when he said all that, by the way, and it fucking _hurt,_ so please teach him something about stronger shields.”  
  
“He…does have stronger shields…normally…yesterday was—”  
  
“I heard. Confetti and parades all around. He _is_ better than you, at least as far as range. I can tell.” Steve didn’t mean that in a disparaging way; simple fact, evaluation by an outside Jedi Knight, and one whose normal duties involved seeking out Force-sensitive potential trainees. Michael wasn’t offended. Fair enough, that verdict; and, anyway, James _was_ remarkable.  
  
“Right,” Steve said, and fished out credits enough to cover both meals. Some Jedi smiled at café owners and ate and drank for free. Steve had never been one of those. Neither had Michael. “So I’ve got to go see a Bith about a telekinetic baby. And you need to go talk to your apprentice. I’m not saying you should jump him on the spot, you’re his Master, we don’t need those kinds of rumors. Wait until Ian says he’s ready. But that doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it like grown-up Jedi. Maybe kiss him. Once. At least pretend he’s not living in your rooms—”  
  
“He’s not!”  
  
“Not according to what I saw. Be discreet, is all I’m saying. I’ll see you in six months or so, okay?”  
  
Michael nodded. Got one more hug, after Steve dropped him off on the Academy landing platform. Stood there watching the courier ship lift away.   
  
In the sun, the city-planet sparkled. Glittering with light, with possibility.   
  
And Michael, watching the ship soar off, felt oddly lighter too.  
  
James was in love with him. James hadn’t spoken up because James thought _Michael_ didn’t love _him_ , not in the same way; but that could be fixed, that could be fixed right now, he could run up to his quarters and make some sort of grand announcement, could kiss James senseless behind the privacy of closed doors, and they’d have to be careful, but they _could_ be careful, and they could maybe possibly conceivably have this at the end—  
  
He did run. Might’ve even assisted the ride up the lift with some judicious touches of levitation.  
  
James opened the door before he even got there, smiling. “I could feel that all the way from here. Good lunch date?”  
  
“Not a date,” Michael said, walking in, catching one freckled hand in his, tugging them over to the sofa. James, datapad in the other hand, followed willingly if bemusedly.   
  
“And don’t tell me you believe that rumor too. Steve and I never—he brought me here. He’s like a sibling, sort of, the one who shows up out of the blue to give you unwanted sex advice—”  
  
“Wait, what?”  
  
“And I did have something to ask you. I—were you busy?” He was looking at his sofa. At what appeared to be holographic wardrobe options displayed across cushions. James in formal suits, dark robes, simple clinging trousers and a loose white shirt and a form-fitting green coat. “Shopping?”  
  
“Not exactly.” James bit his lip. Sat down, dropping the datapad onto Michael’s table. “I had something to ask you, too. I did say, earlier. But go on.”  
  
“No…you first…” When he touched the link, he felt a brief distressed quiver. Harpstrings under siege. And James had been sorting through clothing…  
  
“No,” James said instantly, eyes wide, reassurance flooding in like bruised rivers. “No, I’m not leaving, I swear I’m not leaving. This feels right. Being here. But I do have to…I was an actor. I had a career. I’m not saying I was ever famous, I mean, I had some fans, but nothing to write home about—”  
  
This was factually inaccurate. Michael’d given in and looked up his apprentice’s resumé. Mostly historical period costume dramas, nothing he’d seen, and one or two fluffy romantic-comedy productions. James had never mentioned the Galactic Thespian Award nominations. All three of them.  
  
“—but people’ve been asking. No one’s seen me for over a month.”  
  
“You _want_ to leave.” His lips felt numb. Unless that was his heart, crumpling. “You—of course you do, your life—everything you had—”  
  
“I’m saying I _don’t_ want to leave,” James jumped in, and then they stared at each other for a while, across the model-clothing-strewn furniture.  
  
“All I’m saying,” James said this time, deliberately slowly, “is that I can’t be a normal apprentice, at least for an afternoon, I need to hold a press conference or something, that’s why my agent keeps sending over model clothes. There are rumors. The craziest ones claim I’ve died in training or been brainwashed or gone to the Dark Side and now have to be contained by the combined strength of the Academy. That last one’s kind of flattering, to be honest.”  
  
“You…aren’t leaving.”  
  
“Not until you throw me out.” James squeezed his hand. Freckled conviction. “You’re very much stuck with me, sir.”  
  
“I like being stuck with you,” Michael said, simple echoed words because he couldn’t come up with any others, and gazed at their hands together. “I like you here. You said this feels right.”  
  
“It does.” A bit more sunshine behind those eyes, flying gold in all the blue. Hearing the words. Hearing the words he didn’t say. “I did want to ask you…if I’m doing this, the press conference, d’you want to be there? Transparency, if you want to think of it that way. Letting the galaxy see you. Not faceless.”  
  
Michael turned the idea over in his head, holding James’s hand, not letting go. He was not at all equipped to be the public face of the Jedi Order, of course not, but…  
  
It was a good idea. He didn’t come across as physically imposing as, for instance, his two Wookiee counterparts; he was an empath, not as good as James but better _with_ James, and could pick up free-flowing attitudes toward Jedi among the journalists. He had a noncontroversial reputation: a teacher, a recent graduate, a man who paid for his own drinks.   
  
And he was the one working most closely with James. The world would, from what James’d said, want to know.  
  
“When?”  
  
“Hang on, I’m checking with Ian…” Oceanic eyes went distant; Michael opened his mouth to ask James to _please_ not burn himself out, not now, not ever; and then he reminded himself that James had promised to stop if anything hurt, and moreover he’d know if anything hurt, because that presence had remained circumspectly and sweetly in its accustomed corner of his mind all day.  
  
James came back with a blink and a single full-body shiver, returning to the conversation. “Tomorrow. Patrick wants me back the day after that. You, too. I’m not sure why. Will tomorrow evening work? I’ll call my agent.”  
  
“I think so.” Short notice, but he didn’t have afternoon classes this term. And he could skip a workout in favor of standing shoulder to shoulder with James. “Will you be ready? I mean, you know…” He waved at the sofa. At the wardrobe options. “Do you need anything?”  
  
“Oh.” James banished all the expensive stylish designer options with a sweep of one dismissive hand. “I’m thinking just formal Academy robes. I mean…I am a Jedi.”  
  
Michael met his eyes, at that. Saw the smile.  
  
James tipped that head to one side. “What did you want to ask me? When you got extremely happily home?”  
  
“You—” He stopped.   
  
A press conference. Public. James as his apprentice. And the general populace tended toward suspicion in any case; even before the Galactic Civil War and the First Empire there’d been a strong undercurrent of resentment toward Jedi, fear of mysticism and seemingly inexplicable abilities. Ian and Patrick and their predecessors had tried, were trying, but milennia of mistrust didn’t vanish overnight. Quite a few of the Rim worlds had never seen a Jedi at all. And James’d mentioned, blithely, those rumors about his own disappearance.  
  
They couldn’t afford any slip-ups. Any suggestions of impropriety. Any hint at a Master who’d seduce his own apprentice.  
  
James was watching him, eyes enormous, lips parted.  
  
He wasn’t strong enough to completely say no. Not in the wake of those revelations. Not to those eyes. But he could try to hold on. One more day.  
  
“I do have something to ask you,” he said, and looked down, playing with sturdy freckled fingers in his. James was wearing those thigh-hugging tight trousers again, the ones from the very first day. Michael’s chest ached with tears and love.  
  
“I think you know,” he said, and thought, as clearly as he could _, please believe me, I love you, I want you, I love holding your hand, you feel right to me too._  
  
And James’s eyes got even wider, astonished and full of delight. “Michael—”  
  
“After tomorrow. After—not yet. And we still can’t—you know why we can’t. But I can promise we’ll talk about it.” He held that gaze with his own, trying to broadcast those emotions, trying to let James hear how much he meant it, all of it, every drop.  
  
James’s answer didn’t come in words. Only in the soft smoke-sweet patter of feelings into joined thoughts, glowing swirls of affirmation and agreement and melancholy and quixotic unfurling hope. That last, tinted with longing and newfound anticipation, billowed out to infuse the afternoon, their bodies, the Force, the universe, with optimism. Hung buoyant trusting sparks in the air. Understood. A promise.  
  
 _So,_ Michael murmured into the shimmering hush, honest for the honest moment, _I do have one question I can ask you. For now._  
  
 _Please!_  
  
 _You’re still…sort of recovering. From yesterday. You—_  
  
Red crackles, the beginnings of irritation _: I’m fine! I swear I’m fine, you’d know if—_  
  
 _No, I know, listen._ He tapped fingers over the back of that hand, in his. Used the Force to push not _too_ gently between startled shoulder-blades at the same time, and caught James in the circle of his other arm. James laughed; the universe laughed along.  
  
 _Are you listening, apprentice?_  
  
 _Oh…very wonderfully yes, sir._ James widened eyes mock-innocently at him, nose to nose. “Also do that again sometime. I like that one.”  
  
“So you enjoy me being in charge,” Michael mused, “the way you also enjoy calling me sir, I heard you when you said you did, I know you do,” and James’s next inhale trembled between them. _I meant…you did scare our beloved Academy Heads. They’ll agree to anything I ask, right now. And you’re under my authority, and I’m deciding you’re obviously not well enough to be left alone, today, tonight…_  
  
James began laughing again, wordless, conspiratorial, radiant.  
  
“Stay the night,” Michael said. _Stay here, sleep with me—not like that! we can’t and you know we can’t, if we do—any of what you’re thinking—there’s no way everyone won’t know tomorrow, and you do need to rest, I mean in bed, sleep with me in bed—just stay. Please._  
  
And James settled into the support of offered arms, put his head on Michael’s shoulder, and thought _YES._


	6. already know you that which you need

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which James and Michael hold a press conference, cope with James's previous career, perform Heroic Rescues and first kisses, end up in an infirmary, and face some revelations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the delay! I got sidetracked by Bucky Barnes. I imagine this happens to the best of us. (It certainly happens to Steve Rogers.)
> 
> One more chapter to go!

The press conference happened at an expensive hotel. Not just an expensive hotel. The Imperial, which was _the_ expensive hotel. Michael’d always found the name in somewhat questionable taste, given galactic history, but the place’d existed since before Coruscant had been transformed into the Imperial Center and back again, so he supposed it was a nod to bygone days. The place overall invoked ancient spectacle, with ch’hala trees shimmering in ripples of color with each passing sound, with an entire zoo of exotic creatures lurking on the third floor, with restaurants boasting moonglow and manana nectar. The interior décor gleamed red and black and grey and stark.    
  
Michael’d never been inside before, and he didn’t like it. Didn’t like any of it.   
  
“I know,” James said, looking up at him, hand on his shoulder, just the two of them in the silent antechamber with a horde of microphones on the other side of the door. “I know. I’ve been here three times, and I’ve hated it every time.”   
  
“Premieres?”   
  
“Headaches and afterparties, mostly.” James tipped his head to one side. Left the hand on Michael’s shoulder. Left the impression of strength, of warmth, of spiced ale and rueful fortifications, in Michael’s thoughts. “I know now why I hated it so much. Why you do, too. Meant to intimidate. To overwhelm. All those emotions. Seeping up.”   
  
“You’re better at that than I am,” Michael said, and enjoyed the touch, both physical and not. “The ghosts. The tourists. Feeling all of them. Are you okay?”   
  
“Honestly?” James shrugged, a fleeting jump of demon-wing eyebrows. “It’s better and worse than last time. I finally have decent shields and I know what I’m feeling and when it’s coming from outside, not in. I also _can_ feel more. Pressure. But I’m okay.”   
  
“Tell me if you’re not,” Michael told him, and got a appreciative but hand-waving laugh. “I’m fuckin’ functional, thank you, sir. Between you and Patrick and Ian I’ve got enough coping techniques for four Jedi. I’d be more worried about you. You’ve never done one of these things.”   
  
“What, press conferences?” He collected James’s happy fingers into his, just because he could, because here and now he could. No eyes on them. No recorders. “It can’t be _that_ bad.”   
  
“Oh,” James said, “oh, such a poor innocent child you are, sir, did they let you out of the Academy at _all_ ,” and patted his hand. “I’ll keep you safe.”   
  
Michael glared halfheartedly, did not take his hand away, and sighed, “What did I ever do to deserve an apprentice who swears like a Bilbringi dockworker, seriously,” and James grinned. “You like it. Master.”   
  
This statement, coming from an empath—and one who’d just pushed some incredibly inappropriate swells of lust into Michael’s brain—was unfortunately incontrovertible. Michael sighed again.   
  
James hesitated, a darker bitter strand of brackishness creeping into blueberry-sunshine cheer. That ache echoed like a bruise all down their connection, that shining silvery lifeline so ever-present these days; Michael reached out and tugged him closer, until their legs and hips and chests ended up pressed together, his free hand sliding into James’s hair. “Tell me.”   
  
James made a wry not-really-guilty expression. “I wasn’t hiding it. I can’t, from you—”   
  
“You could. If you wanted to.” True. James could probably manipulate emotion well enough to block Ian and Patrick together, or for that matter the legendary Skywalker himself. Michael hoped the words came out supportive; he meant them to be. He did believe James could do anything.   
  
“—which I don’t, so it’s academic. I was wondering, though. It’ll get better once I’ve been off screens for a few years, but we’ll probably never be able to walk down a fuckin’ street without someone recognizing me. And whatever—else—we are, you’ll be the Master who trained the actor to be a Jedi. Don’t ask me if I regret it, I made that decision the day I left for the Academy, before I ever fell in love with you. But tell me if you do.”   
  
Michael could say so many words, then. I love you, you know I love you, I know what you’ve given up and what you’ve decided you want, please believe that I’ve decided too. I know you’re famous. I know you. I want you.   
  
Finally he said, “You know how I feel,” because James did, every layer of uncertainty about press conferences and fishbowl life, every internal code-of-honor flinch at falling in love with his apprentice, every bedrock surety that his life would forever be brighter with blue eyes at his side. But those words weren’t enough; that New Glasgow accent had said so once before, both of them standing off-balance in the Academy library, watching hovercraft spin by outside. The emotions James sensed could be true and real and unvoiced as gravity; what mattered as much if not more was the way people chose to act, or not to act, on them.   
  
“I love you,” he said, and James smiled a little more, Michael’s fingertips tracing the curve of his cheek. The link shone intangibly in the Force, wistful and silent.   
  
He added, “You know I’ve only not kissed you yet because I wouldn’t be able to stop there,” and James let out a huff of amused breath. “I know. I’ve felt that. I spent two hours in your shower this morning because I was feeling that. Naughty schoolboy fantasies, indeed, sir.”   
  
“Not my fault you’re irresistible.” He nudged the connection gently, sending the underscore, the bass line beneath the melody, the assertion. “I don’t just mean the fantasies.”   
  
“I know what you mean.” But the Force and the miniscule antechamber and stardust-blue eyes were all looking happier again. James did know. “You can bend me over your desk the second Ian and and Patrick decide I’m done with training, then. For now, I love you, I know you love me, we’re both frustrated as hell, want to go do this fuckin’ press conference?”   
  
“No,” Michael said, “I want to bend you over my desk, apprentice,” and James started laughing out loud, and at this point one of the event organizers tapped on the door because they were meant to have opened it five minutes before.    
  
“Right,” James said, and straightened shoulders and dropped his Master’s hand, which immediately felt lonely. “Time to face the sharks and their holocameras. To be fair, they’re not all bad sharks.”   
  
“You’re not helping me relax,” Michael grumbled, and got tugged through the door into a blinding scattershot burst of flashes and video eyes and voice amplifiers shoved toward his face. Hurricanes. Tempests. Voices in multiple languages, Galactic Standard predominant but not by much. Excited cacophonous cheering.   
  
His hand attempted to reach for James’s. Instinct. James wasn’t close enough to touch, nothing suspicious, but offered a hearthfire life-preserver in their thoughts, glowing blue.   
  
James looked at the crowd. Waved. Said cheerfully, “So kind of you all to be here today, just for me, don’t you have better things to do?” Someone near the back of the throng yelled, “No!” and James shouted back “Thank you!” and then considered the room with his head tipped to one side. “Wouldn’t you all be more comfortable with chairs? Should we sit down?”   
  
“We have chairs,” said a different voice. “We can see you better like this.”   
  
James started to answer, then paused, eyebrows tugging together a fraction. “Whatever you want, then, I’m here for you…” Into Michael’s head, narrow and private: _they feel—not hostile, but—this isn’t a good atmosphere, you feel it too, right? Aggressive?_   
  
Michael, who hadn’t, shut his eyes—only a blink—and reached inside, into the Force, into his link with James. And winced. The tension hummed, taut and crackling. _It’s not about you—or not exactly—it’s me?_   
  
_ It’s the Jedi Order. _ James was stretching out emotion-tendrils cautiously, delicate precision work; was reading the crowd, picking up and turning over individual strands with infinite care. Not harming anyone, not altering any minds, only looking. _They don’t trust you—general you, not you in particular—concerns about power, about indoctrination, about losing children—oh, this’s fuckin’ ugly, this one, wondering why if we’re so powerful no one stopped the volcano on Milos—_   
  
_ We tried! Two Jedi died! _   
  
_ I know. I—oh!  _ A flash of comprehension, clear as a supernova; Michael murmured a wordless inquiry, and James shook his head. _Not important right now. I know what Ian and Patrick want us to do, though. And we can do it. Tell you later, sir—_   
  
Out loud, James added, to the assembled holoreporters and recording screens, “Ask me questions, then, go on. Though, y’know, let’s just say upfront that _both_ Lady Angelina and Sir Robert are fantastic kissers, so I’m not going to pick sides.”   
  
This earned a laugh, at least from a few more conciliatory bodies. James was charming them; James _was_ charming, Michael thought. And that was in part empathy, unnoticeable soothing of sharp edges: James was too careful with other people to twist anyone’s honest emotions, but had started gently calming ruffled waters back toward more receptive open listening. But that was also simply James being James: exuberant and sturdy and vibrant and generous, reminding watchers why they’d fallen in love with him in holodramas and behind the scenes interviews in the first place.   
  
“Hi, James,” announced the first microphone in the front row. “So your wardrobe choice, is that meant to signal your allegiance to the Jedi Order, and are you in fact renouncing your New Glasgow citizenship?”   
  
James laughed. “I’m dressed like an apprentice because I am one—Christine, is it? I’ve met you before, right, last year’s Galactic Film Festival? How’s the nephew?—and no, to the second part. I know Jedi’re supposed to, but I have a lot of ties back home, family and charities—and I pay taxes back home too, you think they’d let me stop?”   
  
Christine smiled back. Michael watched, in awe. This was part of James as well, the actor and professional, the man who could handle cameras and commentary with visible confidence; Michael found himself wholly impressed and in love and kind of a little bit in lust on top of that, given the display of competence.   
  
“You’re getting a medal from the Senate, we heard? For saving that ship?”   
  
“If I am, they’ll have to tell me when to show up, because no one’s let me know yet.” James smiled. Michael wondered how the entire galaxy wasn’t melting at the force of that smile. He was, internally.    
  
“So what have you learned?” asked a breathless Twi’lek boy. “Are we talking lightning bolts, telekinesis, what?”   
  
“I’m pretty sure we don’t learn lightning bolts until the fifth year,” James said dryly. “No. Telekinesis, a bit. Not as good as some people. A lot of gymnastics. Empathy, mostly. I’m pretty harmless.”   
  
The universe should’ve imploded at the magnitude of this untruth, but stayed held together by the knowledge of James’s kindness; the crowd didn’t know that but remained suspicious, although this was beginning to be mingled with purer fascinated interest. “So can you tell me what I’m thinking?”   
  
“That’d in fact be telepathy,” James defined patiently. “Not emotions.”   
  
“What does that mean?”   
  
“Means I can’t read your mind, not more than any other Jedi.” James grinned. “I can’t tell you the date your wife proposed to you—unless you tell me—but I can tell you how you felt when she asked the question. If you don’t mind me knowing.”   
  
Some muttering, at this; a gesture from the front. “So you could make us trust you?”   
  
The air in the conference room burned. Ice and cold. Barren as the walls. Michael felt his muscles gather. Ready.    
  
“I could,” James said easily, “but I wouldn’t. And I can tell you I wouldn’t just ’cause that’s fuckin’ unethical, but you don’t have any reason to believe that. You don’t have any reason to believe this either, but—I wouldn’t, no decent Jedi would, because it feels _wrong_. Inside, in my head—it’s like cutting off bits of someone just to make him fit into new clothes. It _hurts_. It hurts worse the further the emotion is from whatever the person’d normally feel. So if you’re wondering whether you can trust me, it’s you wondering. You wouldn’t be, if it were me. And I’d end up with a Cloud-City-sized migraine anyway, and frankly if I’m going to have the hangover I’d rather it come from good whisky than your brains.”   
  
Also a laugh, but with contemplation around the edges; James’s sincerity—and that speech had been sincere, every word—was sinking in. There were some nods.   
  
“So,” said the same journalist, to general appreciation, “what whisky do you like, then?”    
  
James, eyes dancing, promptly rattled off a list—all expensive-sounding, all aged at least twenty-one years, and including two Michael’d never heard of—and the room warmed up a fraction, the walls relaxing again.   
  
“Your publicist said we’d get to meet the Master you’re working with,” mentioned a new voice from the left. “Is this him?”   
  
“Absolutely,” James said. “Michael—sir, sorry—” Deliberate, that. Informal and formal at once, a flawless balance. “—say hi to the cameras.”   
  
“Um,” Michael said. “Hi.” Instant flashes clicked; his image would be appearing on screens across the known worlds, too-broad smile and rumpled hair and all.   
  
“Master Fassbender, you’re a recent Academy graduate yourself, true?”   
  
Michael, startled but not unwilling, agreed, “Yes?”   
  
“You mainly work with younger trainees, according to your class listing. Is there any concern about James’s ability to adapt to the Academy environment?”   
  
“What—no!” Calm, he reminded himself. Deep breaths. Serenity. Training. Was this what James had to put up with, every day?   
  
James sent a quick intangible hand-squeeze his way. Love, resignation, tolerance.   
  
“Um,” he tried, “I do a lot of work with first-year students, regardless of age. Anyone sort of new to the Academy…”   
  
“And you’ve never been assigned an apprentice of your own before now?”   
  
“No, but—”   
  
James leaned in. “The Academy Heads make those decisions, and they obviously thought Michael was best for me. Or they just wanted someone who’d never seen any of my films. Which I don’t mind admitting’s been good for my ego.”   
  
The journalists laughed. The pressure eased even more. The closest girl, a pretty petite blonde Bakuran, inquired plaintively, “Not even _Redemption?_ Because that one made me cry in the theater,” and James shook his head mournfully. “Afraid not.”   
  
“Hey,” Michael said, in part because he knew a good cue when he heard one and in part because he was joining in on what James was doing now, aiding the understated massaging of emotions across the room, harpstrings tuned to a friendlier key, “that was then. I’ve found some time. Enough for _Assassination Man_.”   
  
“Oh, fuck me,” James said, amused distress both real and exaggerated. “Please don’t, sir.”   
  
“ _Bollywood Nebula Queen_?”   
  
“This is what I put up with,” James said to the reporters. “It’s awful. Fuckin’ brutal. Cruel and unusual training conditions.” The coiled mistrust and suspicion eased even further. Nooses back to harmless piles of loose rope. Michael, still a little shaken by the initial reception—James had been right after all about him and being secluded in the Academy—batted a soap-bubble of unhappy curiosity James’s direction and slid his own strength under James’s for mutual support. James leaned into him, intangibly.   
  
“James, will you be coming back to acting in the future?”   
  
“Ah,” James said, politely not saying aloud what he was thinking very loudly about this question, “probably not, a bit busy—”   
  
“Are you concerned about public perceptions that your abilities may have influenced your past performances?”   
  
Michael threw a glance at his apprentice. James didn’t meet his eyes. “Concerned? Not as such, no—”   
  
“There are rumors about the awards committee revoking your Galactic Thespian Awards on the basis that you had an unfair advantage, care to comment?”   
  
Michael hadn’t known that. James had continued to determinedly not look his way, though his awareness brushed like kitten-fur against Michael’s: it’s fine, I’m fine, thank you for worrying, it’s okay.    
  
James answered, comfortably enough to all appearances, “Yes, in fact, I would. For the record: yes, I was contacted by a Guild representative. After some discussion—very polite discussion, and I’d like to thank them and the Jedi Academy Heads for that—we decided that I didn’t have enough conscious control to influence audiences and critics, especially not at a distance, and not through your holoscreens. So I’m keeping the awards, thanks.”   
  
There was a pause while those beings without decent recorders scribbled notes.    
  
“When do you get a lightsaber?”   
  
“When I stop dropping the practice one on my foot.” James widened eyes at the crowd. Radiated likeability. “It’s not going well.”   
  
“It’s not going _badly,_ ” Michael said. “You just never had any kind of saber-style weapons training. We’re working on it.” This was roughly true—none of the words by itself was a lie—but James had arrived with physical agility, stunt choreography, boxing, marksmanship lessons, and the precision of ballroom dancing in his repertoire. He’d never be as fluid and elegant as someone who’d been memorizing the forms for decades, and _had_ dropped his practice blade that morning while they’d been running through advanced disarming techniques, but those were technicalities. “Besides, part of your final test is the construction of your own. You know that.”   
  
James saluted. “Yes, Master.”   
  
“And he says he has to put up with _me_ ,” Michael said to the crowd.    
  
The conference room, walls and all, smirked.   
  
James smiled at the cameras. Then smiled up at Michael too, bright and mischievous and sunny as daybreak inside the hotel.   
  
And then the day froze over in startlement. James didn’t flinch—too professional for that—but the impression burst like sparklers in Michael’s head regardless. _Oh—_   
  
_ What’s wrong? Something here? Someone— _   
  
_ No, someone in trouble—about to be, I mean— _ James pulled intuitions into some sort of order, sorting rapidly. _Here._ And Michael felt it, what James had picked up even earlier: hysteria and terror and panic, not present but imminent, reverberating back and forth in time like a plucked wire.    
  
_ A girl, I think.  _ James sounded distracted. _And her mother. In—the zoo? Can we get down there?_   
  
_ In time? _ He wasn’t sure how many minutes they had. James wasn’t either. _We can try._ Of course they’d try. Wouldn’t leave a little girl in danger. No Jedi would; no empath of James’s abilities could.   
  
James blinked, refocused half his attention on the conference room, and said, “Right,” to the cameras. “We have a bit of an emergency to handle—not serious—but if you’ve got more questions send messages, all right? Sorry—”   
  
Predictably, half the room erupted in confused questions; but they weren’t angry, and in fact many of them seemed to appreciate the politeness. A few more were appreciating James’s attractiveness, and, even more bewilderingly, Michael’s own.   
  
“Come on,” James said, alarm flickering around the link; and they ducked out the door and ran. Several of the more enterprising members of the press corps followed. Michael could’ve stopped them; didn’t bother. Their choice. Anyway, he could yank them out of danger if need be.   
  
The zoo was busy. Mobs of excitable wealthy tourists enjoying the lavish hotel. Shimmering pale forcefields between visitors and the creatures. Miniature krayt dragons and playful thick-furred Chillaks and colorful Talusian fynocks. James stopped, scanning milling bodies. “I can’t…it’s not as strong…”   
  
“Because we’re here?” A few of the closest passersby were giving them odd looks. Jedi weren’t an uncommon sight on Coruscant, but two Jedi with worried expressions trailed by a gaggle of holocameras in the middle of a tourist attraction was. “Because we’ve shifted the future?”   
  
“We haven’t, though, if I can’t find her…”   
  
“Can I help?”   
  
“Give me a second…” James shut both eyes. Flung out perceptions in a searching net. Time and space. Here and not yet here. Michael waited, realized he was holding his breath, and let it out. Wanted to swear at the hovering cameras.   
  
“Guarlara pen,” James said, and took off through the crowd. He didn’t look back; they both knew Michael’d keep up.    
  
They still weren’t quite in time. The mechanical failure happened ten seconds before they arrived.    
  
Guarlara weren’t inherently vicious. They were, however, eight feet tall, capable of carrying heavy loads over mountains, enormously tusked, and easily spooked as a herd. A forcefield failing, combined with a lost balloon popping absurdly on the leader’s tusks, could cause a stampede. And did.   
  
And there was James’s little Bothan girl, right in the path of thundering hooves and muscle and dense black fur.   
  
And there was James, throwing himself into the center of the stampede.   
  
Michael swore out loud—forgetting about the cameras—and brought down half the herd by the simple expedient of yanking with the Force and wrapping ch’halla tree branches around flailing legs. He’d lost track of James.   
  
_ Still here! We’re both fine, I’m doing crowd control— _   
  
Ah. No wonder the tourists were making such an orderly retreat to safe distances.    
  
_ They’re getting a bit panicked, _ James said from somewhere behind herd-animal bodies, _not that I’m complaining, but you took away their ability to move, and they don’t like that. Back in the pen? I’ll calm them down if you can lift them._   
  
_ Can you do that for animals? _   
  
_ Not as easily, but I think so. And it’ll help once you move some of them. _ With an odd note on the last few words; not pain, not precisely, but next-door to it.   
  
_ Are you all right, _ Michael whispered, knowing James wouldn’t lie to him and afraid James would try, telekinetically throwing escaped animals back into their pen, well aware of how ludicrous this act must look to the cameras, equally aware that no one else could’ve stopped the damn stampede.   
  
_ More or less. _ James uncurled himself from the floor, little girl cradled in one arm. Every single camera—journalist and tourist—focused on him. He moved like he had bruises everyplace and his face was whiter than it should’ve been, and he walked over to the weeping mother and let her hug him, and Michael wanted to kiss him.   
  
_ Yes, _ James agreed, coming back to him, somehow managing flippancy and aftermath and triumph at once, _Heroic Actor-Turned-Jedi Saves Child. Get us someplace deserted, please?_   
  
“You are, you know,” Michael said, putting an arm around him—he could, they could, that wasn’t outside the bounds of propriety for Master and apprentice, surely. “Heroic. Are you sure you’re all right?” _Yes, come on, I can distract attention if you can’t—_   
  
“I’m not, and please do.” _You’ll have to catch me in a minute, sorry._   
  
No one was looking at them any longer, courtesy of a few well-aimed nudges. Michael got his apprentice into the closest service corridor, which was empty except for the thumping of his own heart and the harsh acrid taste of alarm. _Of course I—wait, you can handle backlash, you said—_   
  
_ I’m allergic to guarlara. _   
  
“ _What?_ ”    
  
James looked at him with huge eyes, with fingers brushing vainly at a closing-off throat, with a rush of dizziness exploding through both their heads. Oxygen deprivation. Bodily tissues reacting, tightening. Killing him.   
  
Michael caught him in arms clumsy with dread. “James—!” _What can I do, stay with me, stay with me, please, you can’t—not now, not like this, not with me holding you, I won’t let you, but tell me what to do—_   
  
_ Pocket, _ James murmured, thoughts hazing over but not losing the sense of fondness, love, reassurance. _Injector._   
  
Michael fumbled. Found it. Prayed he was doing it right.    
  
He was. James gasped, coughed, shuddered, and went limp in his arms, limp out of relief and not anything worse, taking in huge gulps of air.   
  
Thank you, Michael thought. To the Force, to James for being prepared, to anyone listening. Thank you.   
  
_ Thank you, _ James answered, a wordless spill of weakened but recovering gratitude. _I’m all right…I think…better, anyway…I love you._   
  
“—love you,” Michael whispered back, breathing with him, breathing in time with him, one hand on his chest. _You knew this might—I mean not this exactly but you brought the—_   
  
_ I told you…I’ve been here before…not expecting a fuckin’ stampede…but they sometimes do live shows…thought I should carry it, today… _   
  
“Every fucking day,” Michael said, and buried his face in James’s hair for a while. Wayward strands teased his nose. Affirmation. Alive. “Also you’re going to the infirmary the second you can stand up.”   
  
“Well,” James said, out loud this time, “if it’ll make you feel better, sir,” and Michael wanted to laugh or cry and instead said, “I want to kiss you now,” and James shouted a wave of _YES,_ so Michael kissed him.   
  
They were still sitting on the grimy floor of the service corridor and James had just nearly died and Michael could feel salt drying in his own eyelashes. The angle was awkward and anyone could walk into the corridor at any point. And none of that mattered.   
  
James tasted like fearlessness and happy endings. James kissed him with eyes open at first but falling closed as Michael’s hand settled over his cheek. James made a soft beckoning sound when Michael traced the curve of that lower lip with his tongue. The world glowed.   
  
Wasn’t even a metaphor, that. The unseen strands of energy and connection and past and future lit up. The universe itself taking an interest. The Force ringing like a bell: yes, this, right, this is what we needed.   
  
James, tied in even more closely to the living elements than Michael, gasped. Not the previous frantic scrambling for air; no, this was the sound, Michael thought, that James would make in bed, at the peak, trembling and reverent with sensation.   
  
He nipped lightly at James’s lower lip, testing. James moaned, moving against him. Michael’s heart and soul and body very much wanted to lay all those freckles down on the floor and see what other noises and sensations might be provoked. Michael’s brain, clinging to a last shred of sanity and responsibility, managed, “I can feel your bruises, you know— _oh_ —oh fuck do that again—I’m not having sex with you in a service corridor—also infirmary—”   
  
James blinked at him. Twice. Three times. Blue drowned in desire.   
  
“You said,” Michael said, panting, resisting the urge to fall into the flood, _you said you were good at anchors, pulling yourself out, knowing which one you were. Come back. For now._   
  
One more blink. “I do. I’m the one who completely wants to have sex with you. But…I am feeling your point about the bruises.” _I’m all right. It’s not—I’m not getting lost in it. I can always find you._   
  
“Find the infirmary back at the Academy,” Michael said, hauling them both off the floor. James was _mostly_ steady on his feet, but clearly liked having Michael’s arm around his waist, so Michael left it there. _I’m not going anywhere._   
  
“Yes, sir,” James said, matching their steps together, making their way to the landing pad and Michael’s skyhopper. _I know._   
  
Later, James thoroughly checked over by medical droids, given fluids, tucked into a white-sheeted bed for overnight observation, Michael held his hand and said, “No, I’m not smuggling honey-sticks in here for you, honestly, you _are_ a terrible influence on me,” and James blew him an intangible handless kiss. “Maybe later tonight? Witches need sugar. I’m sure that’s in the legends somewhere.”   
  
“You might have to settle for flavored ice. Medical droids don’t take breaks from watching you, James.”   
  
“Isn’t it lucky my Master’s excellent with mechanical schematics, then.”   
  
“Hmm.”   
  
“Serendipitous. Possibly even the will of the Force.”   
  
“I’ll…see what I can do.” He kicked off boots. Put feet up on the side of James’s bed. “We could watch a holodrama. Historical love story? Coming-of-age tale about a boy off to university for the first time, joining a galactic trivia competition?”   
  
“I take back everything I said earlier,” James said, “I’m never having sex with you ever. For the record, those were both incredibly fun. But actually pick what you want. Whatever drugs they gave me—nothing major, I think, just making sure everything’s back to normal—it’s making me annoyingly sleepy. Unless that’s a side-effect of being trampled by guarlara.”   
  
“I’ve heard that can happen, yes.” James was fine. He knew it. They both knew it. He could feel it. He also could, if he closed his eyes, see James’s face going white, feel James collapsing in his arms.   
  
“I love you,” James said, and put his other hand atop Michael’s where it was already holding his. “I may fall asleep in the middle of watching my own elaborately-costumed crimes against history with you, but you said you weren’t going anywhere, and I’m not either.”   
  
“James,” Michael said. “You—you. Okay. So do you, um, know what what X-Wing pilots do to keep warm on Hoth?”   
  
James gave him that dazzling first-meeting grin. Hangar-bay steel and brilliance and instantaneous shared want. “No, what?”   
  
“Same as everyone else,” Michael said, and knocked his foot lightly against James’s blanketed calf, “each other,” and it really wasn’t that funny, old joke from the depths of his brain, but James gazed at him with utter delight and then cracked up, dissolving into laughter in the middle of the infirmary bed, breathless and alive.   
  
In the middle of the merriment, the infirmary door swished open; Patrick and Ian hurried in, in the manner of Academy Heads pretending determinedly that they hadn’t been running two steps earlier.   
  
“James,” Patrick said, crooking fingers at a chair, which jumped under Ian obediently, “first, are you quite unharmed, and second, _what in space were you two doing?_ ”   
  
“You were saving people,” Ian said, in a tone that sounded like a compromise between dismay and pride, “because Jedi do, yes, we understand, but—”   
  
“—but you could’ve died, and that matters greatly for the Jedi Order—”   
  
“—not to mention the fireworks display in the aftermath, what was that—”   
  
“Oh, darling, you know what that was, you know what _we_ ended up doing—”   
  
“Stop!” Michael interjected, audibly and telepathically for good measure. James was stifling a laugh, unless that was a belated coughing fit. Both Academy Heads deflated somewhat.   
  
“Sorry, James.”   
  
“Sorry, Michael. We do worry.”   
  
“Thank you,” Michael said, and caught James’s nod, “and we’re fine. James is here for observation. What do you two want, besides to check on us?”   
  
“Always assuming ulterior motives.” Patrick conjured a pair of honey-sticks out of thin air and handed them to James. James gave Michael a very pointed look, as well as the second stick. Michael resolved to save it and sneak it into drowsy freckled hands again later.   
  
“We do want to check on you,” Ian said earnestly. “But…well, yes. What you did, today…and we don’t mean just the rescue, though that was marvelously thrilling and on every major channel across the ’net…”   
  
“That,” Patrick picked up, “plus your press conference…James, you know what we need you for, don’t you? You’re not wrong.”   
  
Everyone including the nearest medical droid looked at James. The droid buzzed up and checked his vitals and retreated. Michael, who’d forgotten all about that single instant during the onslaught of the evening, opened his mouth.   
  
“Perceptions,” James said. “I wasn’t sure, before, but that is it, isn’t it? People don’t trust the Order. You want us to change that.”   
  
The words sounded simple. On the surface, almost laughably so.   
  
But then there were the attitudes from the press conference. The public’s deepseated misconceptions about and chilly distrust of the extraordinary. Histories of warfare and Sith Lords and abuses of power. James saying only the day before that they needed the press circuit because fans believed he’d been kidnapped or brainwashed.   
  
And he knew why James was important.   
  
“I can’t,” James said. Ian and Patrick looked at each other. Then at him.   
  
“I mean,” James said, “I can’t—change people’s minds for them. Or hearts. I could. But I can’t. I know you were watching when I said so today.”   
  
“Oh, dear boy,” Ian said, eyes full of compassion. “We’re not asking that of you. I won’t say we didn’t argue over it. You—what you can do—the Force gave you an ability the rest of us don’t have. We quite desperately need you.”   
  
“But we want to change all that,” Patrick said. “No more taking children too young to understand, unless their Force talents manifest in dangerous ways. No more prejudice about Force users who aren’t Jedi, who come from—different traditions, perhaps. And that means you must be above suspicion entirely. And it won’t be easy.”   
  
“You…want me to do what we did today,” James said, very slowly. “Influence people, but not control them. I don’t know.”   
  
“We need you to be yourself,” Patrick said simply. “Break up cantina fights if you want to. Rescue small children and lost colony ships. Visit every world you can. Let them all know who you are.”   
  
“I’ve been a lot of people.” James looked, not at Michael’s face, but at their entwined hands. “I don’t mean just listening in. I’m an actor, I’m a witch’s grandson, I’m not a traditional Jedi, but I get the robes and the lightsaber…you know I’ll hear everything. How people feel about me. About every piece of me.”   
  
“We know it won’t be easy,” Ian ventured.    
  
“That’s not the fuckin’ word I’d use.” James bit his lip. The infirmary air hovered motionless and crisp around them.   
  
“James,” Michael said, the first word he’d said in a very long time, and the gazes swiveled his direction, though James’s dropped almost instantly, as if apprehensive regarding the possible sight.   
  
Michael tapped the foot against his leg more intently. “James.”   
  
“Yes,” James said, not looking up. “Sir.”   
  
“No,” Michael told him, “I mean I know who you are. All the pieces of you. I’ve been your tether. I can be that forever, for you. I would anyway. Because I want to.”   
  
“You think we can do this,” James said. “You think we should.”   
  
“I think you should be you.” He ignored his Academy Heads and all his training, with the next words. “I think if you want to say no, fuck this, and leave, I’ll come with you. I don’t like the idea of changing people’s hearts either. I do think what they want to do—changing the way people see us—is important. But we don’t have to use you to do it.”   
  
Ian opened his mouth. Patrick kicked him.   
  
“I’m kind of tired,” James said.   
  
“About that,” Michael said, and turned on the Heads with every bit of the anger he’d been feeling summoned into his glare. “You picked _now_ to drop that on us? Go the fuck away.”   
  
“Did you always swear quite this much?” Ian asked interestedly.   
  
“James already knew,” Patrick said. “And yes, James, it was. Why Michael, for you. Though I admit the romantic in me rather hoped you’d get along.”   
  
“James,” Ian said, a bit hesitantly, “you’re free to say no. Either way…well, for you to, er, no longer be an apprentice, to be a Jedi Knight, you know you need four elements…your Master’s approval, and ours, both of which I think we can safely say that you have…your lightsaber, even if you never use it again…and some form of the vision ordeal…we were thinking of asking about this in a few weeks, but…once you’re out of the infirmary…”   
  
“Because the heroic timing’s better?” Michael demanded.   
  
“Because James doesn’t have anything left to learn from us,” Patrick said, a little sadly.    
  
“That’s not true.” James ran a hand through his hair. Even pale and pensive and framed by the colorless arms of the infirmary bed, he was beautiful. Breathtaking. “I know why you’re asking. And I know how much I don’t know. Which means I know how badly you need me. Just…give me a day to think, all right? When I’m not surrounded by medical droids?”   
  
Both Heads nodded. Ian said, “Whenever you’re ready,” and they both patted James on the shoulder—gently—before vanishing out the door.    
  
James exhaled, flopping down into the pillow, eyes shut. Michael lifted cold fingertips and kissed them and breathed apologies over freckled skin. Promises of strength. Of himself standing beside James. Whatever blue eyes decided, he’d be there.    
  
The feeling—that certainty—rocked him to the core. If James walked away from the Order over this, Michael’d walk away with him. From the life he’d built here. From his reputation.    
  
On one side, James and his conscience and refusal to manipulate emotions on that towering scale. On the other, every bit of loyalty he’d ever owed to his home and Patrick and Ian and his students and Steve and the profound exhilarating joy of the Force.    
  
But that was a choice he’d already made. He kissed James’s fingers again.   
  
James said, not opening his eyes, “So that was an impressively dramatic evening, wasn’t it, I’m sorry about my life.”   
  
“It’s a good thing I don’t like boring,” Michael said.   
  
James opened the eyes. “You mean it all.”   
  
“You know I do.”   
  
“What we did today…” James nibbled at his lip again. Michael leaned over and kissed him. The medical droids wouldn’t tell. “…I could do that, I think. I’m not as opposed to—to smoothing edges over—as I sound. I’m not going to snap my fingers and make anyone believe anything I want, but if we’re more like…like diplomats, or if it’s no worse than the kind of persuasion we’d try as actors, getting people to feel for a character, getting people to think…but you know why I was arguing, while they were here.”   
  
“I know.” If James hadn’t, the conversation would’ve gone extremely differently. Verging on the perilous. The dark.   
  
“You’ll have to watch me,” James said. “I’ll get tired, I might get lost, I might think that it’d be easier to just push harder…”   
  
“You won’t need it,” Michael said, “but I will. You’re still not going to tell them until tomorrow, are you?”   
  
“No.” James yawned, and tucked Michael’s hand under his cheek as a pillow. Michael kissed his eyebrow. “No, it’ll be good for them. They can think about what they’re asking. And what I can conceivably promise to do. You saved the other honey-stick, didn’t you. That wasn’t even subtle.”   
  
“Want it?”   
  
“Later. Sleep now, sir. And…”   
  
“And?”   
  
“And,” James mused, and an whole array of spectacular images imprinted themselves on Michael’s thoughts, “if I’m properly graduating in the next few days, sir…we can try that one, and that one, too, from the very first night…”   
  
“You have a vision ordeal to get through and a lightsaber to build and you’re still in the infirmary,” Michael said. “And you won’t have to call me sir, or Master, or any of that, afterward.” _Unless you happen to want to, while we do THAT._   
  
_ Yes, sir, _ James agreed, and fell asleep cuddling his hand. Michael stayed awake, watching him breathe, aware of every beat of his own heart, knowing he’d made his choices, knowing they both had, knowing they’d make them again, knowing all those heartbeats belonged to James.


	7. more powerful than you could possibly imagine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James faces the Academy graduation ordeals. Also, pre-ordeal sex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Warnings just in case:** contains mention of centuries-ago murder of children, and ghosts trying to talk James into giving up.
> 
> Also, yes, that now says eight chapters. Only eight. I swear. I already have a good outline for the last bit. 
> 
> Also also, happy endings, trust me.

James tried to say two days after the press conference and subsequent rescue and medical drama that he felt a hundred percent fine and up to anything that, in his words, the Academy could fuckin’ throw at him. Patrick and Ian beamed with excitement. Michael said no.  
  
James pointed out that himself no longer being an apprentice would avoid Michael’s moral scruples—and any negative publicity if word got out—about them having sex. Michael gritted his teeth and took very cold showers.  
  
James gave him the plaintive heart-melting soulful eyes that’d earned one of those three Galactic Thespian Awards. Michael threatened to kick him out and back into his own quarters, though they both knew that was a threat with no follow-through.  
  
James slept in his arms at night, head on Michael’s shoulder, arms around Michael in turn. The nights were sweet, and the lazy morning kisses were sweeter.  
  
James tried sleeping naked once. Michael went on record saying that yes, as James’s Master, he considered his apprentice to be ready for the final tests; he added, “but I strongly recommend giving him at least a week to recover from near-fatal allergic reactions after the recent incident,” a statement made sixty percent because his heart was still aching and forty percent because he was annoyed that James had never mentioned said allergies.  
  
James telekinetically flung a boot at him. Michael, who would probably always be marginally better at physical mechanical Force manipulation, caught it and hid it under the bed. James sighed, and used his enforced vacation to tinker with the _Lady Charlie_ ’s hyperdrive limiter, coaxing more speed out of the aging-but-game engine.  
  
“Please,” James said on the seventh night, in the dark, their bodies pressed together. Michael’d vetoed any further sleeping naked on the grounds that he’d end up tackling his apprentice into the mattress. “Come on, sir, you know I can handle it and I know I can handle it, I’ll admit I needed a day or two if you want but I’m fine now and you’re giving me busywork exercises and the other apprentices know it,” and Michael shut his eyes and hid his face in dark hair and said, “I know.”  
  
“Then—”  
  
“I don’t want to see you get hurt.”  
  
“You think I’ll get hurt?” Not offended, mostly inquisitive. “That bad?”  
  
“I think I know what they’ll ask you to do—I’m guessing it’ll be sort of what I did, and I’m an empath, even if I’m not you—and going into that place…yes. It’ll hurt, James.”  
  
“Oh.” James brought a hand up, ran it through Michael’s hair, breathed out slowly over his shoulder. “Is there some other part I can do first? Construction of a lightsaber, you said?”  
  
“I did,” Michael said, closing his eyes under the sensation of that hand. “In the morning.”  
  
Patrick and Ian enthusiastically approved of this idea. Michael did as well, insofar as it kept James from getting frustrated and didn’t require too much exertion. He let James play with his own—green, dual-crystal core, extendable blade but nothing too showy—and offered schematics, hand-grip options, ideas.  
  
“Not Force-activated?”  
  
“No…” James tapped fingers over a design. “In an emergency, if I’m incapacitated, I’d like to be able to let someone else pick it up and defend me. A Han Solo with the tauntaun, if you want fairly disgusting mythology. Though…a kill switch, a Force version, _is_ a good idea. If I drop it on my foot again. I like your grip style, but I’d need to adjust it for my hands. And maybe a little heavier. You’re better at classical forms; I’ll have to be stronger.”  
  
“Hmm,” Michael said, and moved circuit diagrams around. “Try this?”  
  
Once they’d more or less got the design worked out—James would build it on his own, but nothing kept him from seeking input—he took James down to the Crystal Room and enjoyed the sight of blue eyes lit up with reflected rainbows.  
  
“This…”  
  
“Beautiful,” Michael said, watching him spin around and get entranced by dancing prisms, light spilling in from  wide windows and pouring through colored jewels and painting emerald and topaz and amethyst and sapphire across white walls.  
  
James tossed a grin his way. Marigold light danced in his hair; chalcedony and jade tangled in his rolled-up sleeves. “So I pick one? Or two?”  
  
“Probably one, for your first construction. You can always make a second.” He wandered over to a swirl of glimmering moonstone, nearly translucent. “Are you thinking blue?”  
  
“I like blue.” James toyed with a flawless deep topaz, set it down. “I don’t know…”  
  
“How do you feel about aquamarines? Lighter than the one you’re holding.” And with a hint of sea-green, not that he was going to say that.  
  
“Maybe.” James explored distant corners, less popular boxes, stones not being shown off in mobiles or stands. “Seems like I should feel it. Just…see one and be sure about it, y’know?”  
  
“Some people do,” Michael admitted truthfully. “Not everyone. You might not. Your strengths aren’t as mechanical.”  
  
“No, I know…oh, wait…come here for a minute? Look at this one?”  
  
Michael joined him in the left corner. “Those aren’t really meant to be used.”  
  
“Is there some reason for that? They’re not labeled.”  
  
“No…they’ll work fine…but you’ll get odd colors. Not pure.” The stone James was holding out for his inspection was in fact a blue diamond, elegant and large and brilliant; but it had a black streak, still diamond but miscolored, in the center. Not a crack, not a break, but any blade made with that stone would be blue with a thin black line at the core. James laughed. “Well, I’m hardly the stellar example of pure, am I. I kind of like it.”  
  
“You do?” He didn’t mean that question to sound like _are you sure?_ Came out that way, though. “I mean…you can have anything in here.”  
  
James levitated the flawed crystal—not really a flaw, of course, each gem here would function adequately regardless of the light it cast—and flipped it around, eyes lingering on the inky streak through the blue diamond heart.  
  
Michael opened his mouth.  
  
James looked up, smile slanting through the multihued light. “I’m not evil.”  
  
“I don’t think you are,” Michael said, utterly truthful.  
  
“I don’t think I’m evil, either. I mean I don’t spend a lot of time wondering. Feel like I’d know. Or you’d tell me. I just think it’s important.” Fingers slid over the gemstone surface, expressive and kind. “Loving the bits no one else loves.”  
  
“You love a crystal that’s going to look like a bruise,” Michael said after a second, “blue and black, seriously, don’t say I didn’t warn you…” and James started laughing and observed, “You get to fight next to me, sir,” and Michael pushed him up against the closest wall and kissed him, mouths meeting under the shimmering thicket of glorious rainbows.  
  
The completed lightsaber was radiant. Not dark at all. Blue and black and clear, and Michael would’ve sworn that that shouldn’t work, a black core couldn’t be clear, but it did work somehow, unconventional and smoke-tinted and sapphire-swirled. James let him run through a few routines with it; Michael fell wholeheartedly in love. The grip was broader than his own—James had larger palms, though Michael had longer fingers—but felt close, an intentional echo that’d make it easy for them to trade if need be in a fight; the blade hummed and purred and swept around in perfectly balanced arcs.  
  
James leaned one tired but triumphant shoulder against the practice mirror, grinning. “Looks good in your hands.”  
  
“It’s yours,” Michael said, coming back, “but I might have you make one for me…”  
  
“Part of being a Jedi Knight, you said. Making your own, you said. Being good at construction.” But James’s eyes were dancing. “Spar with me? Nothing intense, I’ve not slept all night. Trapped by circuit diagrams. Exhibition style?”  
  
“Oh fuck yes,” Michael agreed, and got out his own and slid into fluid forms next to James, blades meeting, dancing, sliding, sparking. Footwork and spins and breathlessness, throwing in the showy twirls and tricks they’d never use in a proper fight, flash and style and prestige; James kept up easily, or maybe Michael was keeping up with him, or it didn’t matter. They moved together, and flowed like water.  
  
Applause rang out from the practice room doorway. They turned in unison and found both Academy Heads, plus quite a large portion of the senior trainees, loudly approving. At least one other instructor, someplace in the back, was pointing out details about Michael’s spin-and-kick technique.  
  
“Well,” Ian proclaimed cheerfully, “I’d call that a successfully passed test, I think,” and Michael and James traded smiles.  
  
“Entirely,” Patrick concurred, “so we’ve got the vision ordeal left to go,” and Michael’s smile plummeted to somewhere around his toes.  
  
They ended up in one of the smaller briefing rooms for the argument, mostly because it was nearby and Michael was already angry. James fiddled his brand-new lightsaber hilt idly between fingers, taking a chair at the glossy table; Patrick and Ian sat down as well.  
  
Michael stood, and preemptively barricaded, “No.”  
  
“Okay…” James flipped the lightsaber into the air, caught it one-handed. “What don’t I know?”  
  
“They’re going to send you into the Dark Room,” Michael said. “No.”  
  
“Oh.” James stopped playing with his lightsaber and instead drummed fingers over shining patterned wood. “I see. I can do that.”  
  
“You can—you don’t even know what we’re talking about!”  
  
“Secret chamber, sometimes used for apprentice ordeals if the requirement’s not being otherwise met, site of the bloodiest massacre and greatest tragedy on Academy grounds, where the Dark Skywalker slaughtered all the children?” James lifted an eyebrow at Michael’s expression. “The apprentices do talk to each other, sir.”  
  
“So you know what we’re asking,” Ian said. “Confrontation with the dark side of yourself, of the Jedi, of power…everything ugly that you could be…”  
  
“You can’t,” Michael said. “You can’t ask him to—”  
  
“You did it,” Ian said.  
  
“He’s stronger than I am.” No shame, not when begging for James’s safety. “He’ll feel—”  
  
“Michael,” James said.  
  
“He is stronger than you,” Patrick said, infinitely sad and kind, “and so he’ll have to be stronger.”  
  
“I walked out and couldn’t sleep for a month! I threw up every time I tried to eat! Steve had to literally Force-push me into—” He swung his desperation around on James. “Don’t. They’ll come up with something else. Or I will.”  
  
“They’re not wrong,” James said. “I have to be better. Not better than you; better than anyone. Being me. What I am. And what else am I going to do, singlehandedly blow up a Sun Crusher? Not a lot of those left around these days. And you’re better at mechanics.”  
  
“You could die,” Michael said. “I love you, and you might die in that room.”  
  
“We will try our best not to let you die,” Ian put in, sounding a bit miffed. “We’ll be right outside, and we know you and Michael’ve got an empathic link in place; we’ll be observing. We can pull you out.”  
  
“I’ll try not to need it,” James said, very dry, but his thoughts whispered into Michael’s: _it’s fine, I’ll be fine, you know I’m good, sir. I love you, I’m good at this, we’ll be fine._  
  
“Tomorrow?” Ian suggested, “no sense putting it off if James feels ready?” and James nodded, and Michael threw half the conference chairs at the wall with a gesture and clung to James’s stalwart confidence in his heart.  
  
Tomorrow. Not enough time. No time at all. No amount of time ever would be enough; he should’ve known James forever, before the Academy, before the film-star roles, before everything. Even that wouldn’t’ve been enough, but it would’ve been _more_.  
  
He made dinner by hand, fresh wild grains and subtle spice and sweet berry wine. James lifted that familiar eyebrow at him, but didn’t protest the caretaking. Only caught his hand and kissed it, over cream-cakes decorated with crushed crystallized amber honey.  
  
James came over to him as they were cleaning up, smile wide and enchanting, eyes so blue that Michael couldn’t look away. “Can I ask you something, sir?”  
  
“You mean ask me for something,” Michael said, putting down his dishtowel. He knew James had used the honorific on purpose; the glint of mischief twinkled like love in shared thoughts. “I know what you’re going to ask. I can’t. We can’t. We…shouldn’t.”  
  
“Tell me why not.” James put a hand on his arm. Every tiny hair, every cell of his body, crackled into stupendous awareness. Holding a freshly-washed fork, standing in their quarters, breathless with need.  
  
“Um. You. Tomorrow.”  
  
“Me, tomorrow.” James walked the hand along his arm. Not insistent, but intent. “Tell me why we can’t have this, if there’s a chance I won’t be okay tomorrow.”  
  
“You might be tired,” Michael whispered, leaning into the touch, turning so that their bodies fit together. “Sore. No sleep. Distracted. _I_ might be distracted.”  
  
“If we don’t, will we be any less distracted?” James leaned in, up on tiptoes, kiss wine-sweet against the corner of Michael’s mouth. “Serious question.”  
  
“Probably…not…but…” Thinking. Words. Ground rules. Compromise. “Okay. Yes. I love you, yes, okay. But—”  
  
“Yes—”  
  
“Yes, but with conditions.” He put a hand around James’s wrist. James blinked, caught breath, looked up at him with eyes newly huge and dark. Michael ended up rubbing a thumb over the fine bones and freckles, underscoring the point. James did—they both did—enjoy that teasing _sir_. The establishment of conditions. “Okay. One. No—nothing that pushes you. Mentally or physically. Nothing, um, I’m not…going to, y’know, fuck you. Not tonight.”  
  
“Not even—”  
  
“Not even your mouth.” He set the index finger of his other hand over parted lips. James shivered, beautifully responsive, picking up and echoing back every pulse of emotion. “No chance that _any_ part of you might be sore. Clear?”  
  
“Yes, sir,” James said from behind the finger, and just to be impudent kissed it. “So, then…what would you like me to do for you?”  
  
“Still talking. Two, you tell me what you like.” Testing, he added, _I know it’s easy for you to tell me what I like. Don’t. I know that’s harder. Do it for me._  
  
James’s eyes went from tidepools to oceans of desire, at that. _Yes, sir._  
  
“Three, um, this might not last very long.” And, as James began to laugh, “not just _that_ —though that’s probably true around you—but I meant it about not tiring you out. We’ll be quick, and you’ll like it. Agreed?”  
  
“Agreed,” James said, wordless profusion of joy and want and fantastic impatience in their heads. “So…”  
  
“Get naked,” Michael told him, “and get in bed, James,” and James laughed out loud and went, flinging himself across creamy sheets like the embodiment of sensuality, fair skin and star-map freckles spread out for appreciation.  
  
Michael very decidedly wanted to appreciate. He wanted to take his time, to savor every damn freckle and every ticklish spot and every old scar, to memorize all the places that earned gasps and keens and moans.  
  
Not enough time, again. Not ever, in the universe.  
  
He shed shirt and trousers and plopped himself onto the bed, no doubt with less grace than James’s well-honed unabashed physicality. Said, lying between cinnamon-sprinkled thighs, “I love you.”  
  
James blushed everywhere. Mapping-linen washed over with roses. Interesting; Michael’d not expected much if anything to make his apprentice blush in bed.  
  
“I can hear you,” James said. “And no. Anything you can name, I’ve probably tried it or heard someone getting off on it, we can even do the thing with the flavored ice-pops if you want, but I just—it’s just—people say that to me a lot in bed. About loving me. Sometimes they even think they do.” _But they don’t know me. You do. And you mean it._  
  
“I meant it the first day we met,” Michael said, and kissed his left knee, just above a little binary system of freckle-suns. _Remember the second rule I gave you. Stop me if you don’t like this._  
  
“Why would I not— _oh_ —” James gasped. Michael licked his cock again, one deliberate stroke of tongue over that delectable thick length. James tasted like heat and silk and some indefinable sweetness, maybe from all the sugar, or the anticipation, or just himself.  
  
His apprentice. There was a hint of guilt—naughty, filthy, transgressive, wrong—along with that thought, but not a strong hint. More of a shy tap, really: James was of age, and James wanted this, and if—when—everything worked out tomorrow James would be a Jedi Knight, his equal in rank the way they were equals in every other way now.  
  
Besides, James, in his bed, felt amused and aroused at the intimation of naughtiness. Schoolboy fantasies. On both sides, apparently. And that thought made it all hotter, sizzling along each pulse-beat.  
  
He took James into his mouth slowly—it’d been a while, but that wasn’t his reason; he wanted to see James squirm and whimper and try to beg for more, coming apart beneath him—and licked and sucked and teased, lips and teeth and tongue along the shaft, down to the base, lapping at the tip and tasting James there too, aroused and leaking. James trembled and moaned his name in their heads, pleasure ebbing and rolling and cresting between them; Michael learned everything that made shooting-stars of pleasure streak behind their eyes, and did all those things over and over again.  
  
A note of discordant discomfort made him pause. It wasn’t _that_ kind of discomfort, James didn’t want him to stop, but it was present, and he breathed and mouthed lightly over James’s base and balls and inner thighs, sorting it out.  
  
Oh. That made sense, to a degree. He still wasn’t entirely sure whether the feeling stemmed from hesitance at being the center of attention—James was so used to _giving_ —or if James, being so strongly empathic, genuinely couldn’t quite relax without his partner’s bliss resonating and reassuring him from the other side. Might be a question for the future, might not, but for now he lifted his head and let James’s cock slide from his mouth with a wet pop. James murmured his name, sounding dazed.  
  
Michael kissed his stomach, his chest—working his way up—and those delicious panting lips. James focused on him, blushing again but happy, and the wave of love crashed over them both like an avalanche, but a euphoric one, made of stardust and fierceness and joy.  
  
 _Still good?_ he thought, and James whispered back, “Love you,” and reached for him. Michael rocked their hips together, felt James’s cock slide against his, and got a hand between them, wrapping it firmly around both shafts. James groaned, body arching, thrusting up. The pleasure built and built, thrumming through the link; Michael’d never felt anything like this, like sex with James, and James’s hand was there too, slippery with both their eager wetness and stroking alongside his as they rocked together—  
  
James was _spectacular_ , knowing exactly where and how hard and how fast to touch. Michael, with his last dazed thoughts, took that as a challenge because maybe James was better but Michael could damn well play with emotions too, and he caught every glowing drop of ecstasy and amplified it and flung it right back, escalation into numinous heights, and shouted, _I love you!_  
  
James went rigid against him, thoughts shocked a brilliant clean white by unguarded climax, coming and coming in waves over their hands. Michael followed a second later, swept away.  
  
The Force-waves might’ve been singing. He was too suffused by lightning to tell.  
  
After a while James pushed at him through the link, drowsy and cheerful, _so…that…was you not tiring me out, was it?_  
  
 _Quiet,_ Michael thought back mock-sternly, _rest,_ and kissed him and cleaned them up between more kisses. The universe rustled and shook itself and stretched into its new configuration. They’d very likely get complaints in the morning, or possibly not. Everyone probably knew by now. Himself and James, changing the world. Himself and James and that sense of pieces snapping into place, the way they’d unconsciously known they were meant to be.  
  
“Love you,” James yawned, settling naked into his arms, thoughts a mingled blur of proprietariness and satiation and contentment and trust. Proprietariness, Michael thought, amused in turn. He stroked a now-clean hand over James’s hair. They did belong to each other. Even if James occasionally still wanted to call him sir.  
  
“I might,” James said, half-asleep. “Later.”  
  
“I love you,” Michael told him, and played with his hair, rubbed his back, breathed with him. In and out, until they both tumbled into sleep, and then it was morning.

He fed James breakfast, too. Starfruit and eggs and hot chocolate with mint. In bed. James nibbled fruit out of Michael’s fingers, laughed, said, “Will you stop acting like it’s my last day of existence,” and whacked him with a pillow. Michael laughed along, and then sighed.  
  
They went down to the lower levels, the closed-off levels, the dim and gritty levels, hand in hand.  
  
Patrick and Ian met them at the lift, expressions pensive but encouraging. Patrick offered a “Good morning;” Ian murmured, “Delightful morning, in fact, after last night—” and Patrick stepped on his foot but then put in the two cents of, “You two _are_ aware you did something fundamental to the energy of the universe, everything got brighter, I’m certain you can tell?”  
  
“Um,” Michael said, guiltily. He’d put that down to afterglow. Unbelievable, world-altering, beautiful afterglow.  
  
“I like it,” James said. “Sort of new all over. Everyone feels like beginnings, in my head. Speaking of…”  
  
“Yes, quite right.” They padded down a noiseless corridor. Memories hung in the quiet like unspeaking scars. A boy’s rage, and the power of the dark side, and decimation. Michael shivered; James leaned in under his arm.  
  
The world down here wasn’t theirs, and simultaneously was. A reminder. What a good man could become. A scorch mark, a burn, never fully healed. Infused with suffering.  
  
When he breathed, he imagined he could taste blood mixed in with the dust. Likely not real. He hoped.  
  
Their footsteps might’ve made sound, but the heavy quiet ate up all the sound and tucked it away. Got fat on fear.  
  
James started looking more pale as they neared the training room where most of the deaths had taken place. Some had been out in the corridor; the renegade Jedi-turned-Sith hadn’t let them escape. Michael’s heartbeat thumped in his ears. The dread wasn’t nameless. Had a lot of names. A Sith Lord, for one. A Jedi who loved too cruelly. A man Michael loved and might lose.  
  
James stopped in front of the room. Touched the door almost unthinkingly, hand against wood, eyes distant. “I can feel it…”  
  
“You’ll go in,” Ian said, “and come out. When you can.”  
  
“I’d say that sounds uncomplicated, but I’m thoroughly sure it’s not.” James shrugged out of his cloak, leaving himself in light trousers and shirt; handed his lightsaber to Michael. “I take in whatever I take in with me, right? So no weapons?”  
  
“Up to you,” Patrick said.  
  
“Keep it for me,” James said to Michael. Michael said, “I love you,” and tried not to feel as if James had just given him a parting gift, a memorial, a good-bye.  
  
James’s eyes softened, warmed, kindled: the same blue they’d been last night, only for him, only them in the world. “I love you, too. Be back before you know it. Sir.”  
  
“I’ll be here,” Michael vowed, and tugged lightly at the link; it felt secure, that same silver-blue cord that’d never left since the day he’d shown James how to play with puzzle-balls, since they’d seen what they could do with him as an anchor for James’s power. Secure, like they’d never be truly apart. _Never_ was a big word. “I’ll be watching. Ian and Patrick too, if you don’t mind.”  
  
“The more the merrier,” James tossed back, with a wink that narrowly missed being its flirtatious self. “Come on.”  
  
That sensation was an odd one: a lot like having both Academy Heads standing behind him and peeking over his shoulders, Michael decided. While he himself stepped ever-so-slightly out-of-body and followed James.  
  
But this way he’d know the second anything went wrong. And all three of them could pull James out if they had to.  
  
“Thanks for that,” James said, wryly but with a mental kiss that landed squarely on Michael’s lips, not shared with anyone else.  
  
“We think you’ll be fine.”  
  
“You’re strong enough for this.”  
  
“May the Force be with you,” Michael said, and kissed him back, telepathically and physically and extremely passionately. Their Academy Heads didn’t even bother to look away.  
  
“Definitely coming back for _that_ ,” James said when Michael let him go, and looked at the door again.  
  
It swung open. Soundless. All on its own.  
  
The room beyond looked exactly like a centuries-untouched trainee classroom. Dusty holoprojectors. Old shelves. Sealed-off windows. Might’ve been innocuous. Wasn’t.  
  
James took two steps in. The door swung shut. The link stayed distinct and sharp and bright: they could see what James saw, feel what James felt. They couldn’t intervene.  
  
James walked into the center of the Dark Room. Stopped, head cocked to one side—Michael felt the motion as if it were his—and listened.  
  
James had no doubt heard the whispers before Michael, eavesdropping imperceptibly, ever could. He hovered in the back of James’s thoughts and prepared to throw a lifeline if need be.  
  
“Hi,” James said to the air. “Coming out to chat, are you?”  
  
The silence rustled. Skittered. Raced crawling legs up and down walls and spines. No mist, only darkness. Shadows where there shouldn’t be, and growing.  
  
“Come on,” James invited, holding out a hand, and oh Michael’s heart twisted and coiled in on itself at the plainspoken kindness. “Don’t be shy, I can hear you.”  
  
 _Not shy_  
  
 _We’re not shy_  
  
 _You should be afraid_  
  
James smiled, not mocking, only entertained. “You think I’m not?”  
  
 _Stupid boy_  
  
 _Stupid boy coming in here_  
  
 _Stupid empath_  
  
 _We can kill you with a thought_  
  
 _Kill you the way we were killed_  
  
“Yes.” James turned, tracking the nearest crawling shadow. “I know. I’m so sorry.”  
  
 _Sorry_  
  
 _You should be sorry_  
  
 _You should be sorry for yourself_  
  
 _Little witch-boy_  
  
“Ah.” James’s fingers curled in, hand drifting back to his side. “Thought that might come up. Ordeal, right?—ordeal away, then.”  
  
 _Think you can be a Jedi_  
  
 _Think you deserve to be a Jedi_  
  
 _Killer_  
  
“I’m not.”  
  
 _Killer from a line of killers—_ Images, dazzling and harsh as bitter day. High and eerie laughter. Rancors. Blood-streaked eyes. Death to anyone stumbling over the Nightsisters’ planet.  
  
“That’s them,” James said. “Not me.”  
  
 _You could_  
  
 _You know you could_  
  
 _Haven’t you wanted to_  
  
 _Haven’t you wanted to every time you heard those jokes those rumors those shocked mutters in the dark about what you are_  
  
 _Haven’t you wanted to lay waste to the galaxy, all those petty tiny creeping minds, so small, such pathetic boring ugly emotion_  
  
 _Haven’t you wanted to fix them all_  
  
Michael forgot how to inhale. No, no, please say no, please—  
  
James laughed, sunshine-bright sound sweeping off graveyard clouds. “No. They’re all just people. Can’t fix people, can you, or people wouldn’t be people. If that sentence made any sense. Sorry.”  
  
The ghosts seemed nonplussed for an instant. Michael gulped in air and thankfulness.  
  
The darkness swung again, harder this time. Heavier weight, not holding back. Bigger weapons.  
  
 _You feel too much_  
  
 _What will you do when you feel too much_  
  
 _When you’re afraid and alone and the feelings that aren’t yours seep in when your walls come down when you come apart in other people_  
  
 _Scared_  
  
 _So scared_  
  
 _We can feel it_  
  
 _How can you hope to do this_  
  
 _How can you hope to survive this_  
  
 _Go home_  
  
 _Go home to die_  
  
James did flinch at that. Michael felt it. Icicle-point through the heart, vicious and cold, the shard of a broken snowflake lodged between one beat and the next.  
  
“You’re right.” James’s voice came out uneven. Shaken. “I’m scared. I’m still here. That’s my choice, isn’t it, and I’m making it.”  
  
 _The universe won’t love you_  
  
 _They won’t ever love you_  
  
 _Who could love you, who could believe you, how could you believe him—_ The specter that loomed abruptly out of cobwebs and tragedy wore Michael’s face. _How can you believe him when you know you could be making him feel_  
  
 _When you know someday you’ll be drawn to someone’s pain and you’ll give her back the pleasure in her body one more way to heal you won’t be able to not help and you know he’ll hate you for it_  
  
 _You know you could make him love you when he hates you_  
  
 _You know you could do it without even thinking_  
  
 _How do you know you haven’t already_  
  
 _When you fuck a lonely senator to give him one night’s reminder of joy and save that life,_ said the ghost wearing Michael’s eyes, _this face will hate you_  
  
James was crying. Michael could feel it. Tears on his cheeks, stinging, splashing to the floor. “I know. I know. I…didn’t know vision ordeals said fuck, guess it’s not a surprise, though…my head, isn’t it…”  
  
No! Michael tried to scream the words into the horrible bottomless deepening abyss. No, no, I love you, I swear I love you, whatever you have to do I know you’re doing it to give someone else solace, you’ll come home to me, I know you love me, that’s all that matters in the end, James, PLEASE—  
  
Ian slammed a telepathic gag over his voice. Michael staggered physically from the shock. Nearly fell over right there in the hallway.  
  
James swiped a hand over his face. His mouth tasted like blood; Michael, catching the copper and iron secondhand, realized that James must’ve bitten his own lip hard enough for that.  
  
The pain cut through the cataclysm and got them both thinking more clearly, James directly, Michael by proxy. He wanted to cry too; thought he might be. Ian and Patrick had hands on his shoulders, holdng him up.  
  
“I can live with him hating me,” James whispered. “I knew he might. How could he not, everything I am, what I could do to him…but that’s not the point, is it? He’s a Jedi and I’m a Jedi and he’ll be somewhere in the universe protecting innocents and teaching students and I’ll be…me…and we’ll fucking do the right thing, we’ll save lives, because that’s what we _do_.”  
  
 _So many lives_  
  
 _So many lives in your head_  
  
 _Burn out like a star little empath drowning in other people and so alone_  
  
The onslaught knocked James to the ground. Rising wind, sheer terror, betrayal, agony, scorching flesh, memories memories memories of children screaming and trying to fight back and dying—  
  
The Dark Room knew the feelings. Had drunk up one twisted boy’s glee at the act of slaughter. Poured that into James, the most powerful empath anyone’d ever known, now.  
  
Patrick and Ian stirred uneasily. The lines of the Force rang and quivered, drawn taut with alarm. Michael tensed every muscle, ready to jump in; he didn’t care if that was technically failure on both sides, this was more than he’d gone through, more than anything anyone’d gone through since legendary days, and they couldn’t expect more—  
  
James, crumpled onto the ground and bleeding—lip again, but also nose and ears and a palm where fingernails skewered flesh—panted, “I’m so sorry…”  
  
 _You should be_  
  
 _You are_  
  
 _Of course you are_  
  
“Not for me…you aren’t listening…thought you could hear me.” James coughed, spit blood, tried again. “For you.”  
  
 _For us_  
  
 _Stupid boy_  
  
 _You’re dying_  
  
“Yeah…got that…thanks. You’re not…telling me anything I don’t already…think about at night, y’know? And I might be dying…appreciate it if we could let up on that…by the way…but you’re already dead, aren’t you? You’re the children.”  
  
Everything—the voices, the ghostly wind, the shuddering of Force-energy—went motionless.  
  
In the hush, out in the hallway, Michael threw wild stares at Patrick and Ian, both of whom blinked blank surprise back.  
  
“You are,” James said, and didn’t bother to get up, just coiled one leg under him and rested elbows on the other knee. “Everyone thinks you’re just the residue. The—the dark-side miasma, the leftovers, kind of, if you don’t mind being compared to my Gran’s meatloaf. Sorry. But you’re not. You’re not what happened. You’re who it happened to.”  
  
Michael spotted Patrick mouthing _what?_ in Ian’s direction. Ian made a wide-eyed _I don’t know!_ expression in return.  
  
He shook off their shock-relaxed grip and put a hand on the door. It didn’t react. Chilly and sealed shut by something unbreakable that wasn’t the lock.  
  
“I’m so sorry,” James told the dark. “You’re hurting so much, I can hear it…I can help, I think. If you trust me.”  
  
 _Trust_  
  
 _Trust you_  
  
 _Who are you?_  
  
“Exactly who you said I was.” One hand out, palm up, open. Angry red nail-crescents mute across calluses and lines. “You know me. Can I try? Can’t promise it’ll work, but I’m thinkin’ I’m the best you’ve got.”  
  
 _Lonely_  
  
 _So many years_  
  
 _So many years afraid_  
  
 _Help?_  
  
“Everyone who comes down here’s afraid, I know.” James was searching out individual voices, picking out specific scampering shadows, focusing on each one in turn. “And you’re afraid—you’ve been afraid for centuries, and I’m so fuckin’ impressed that you’re talking to me, have I said that?—so all you ever get is fear, and that’s not your fault, it’s _not_ , all right? You were kids. And what happened happened _to_ you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”  
  
 _Hurt people_  
  
 _Hurt you_  
  
 _People who come here sometimes they die sometimes they scream_  
  
“Still not your fault. The Jedi used you. They didn’t mean to—I don’t think they knew about you—but they did.” James kept his voice calm, steady, soothing, the way he might tempt a feral Alderaanian pittin off city streets and indoors for petting and a saucer of milk. Michael, witnessing every syllable and every stretch of empathic ability and every opened-up broadcast of welcome, thought: miracle.  
  
A host of sleek black shadows drifted in. One by one at first. Then more. Then more, until ninety percent of the Dark Room gloomed in ordinary mundane grey and James’s spot on the floor was ringed by onyx eyeless curiosity.  
  
“You were trainees,” James said. Blood lingered on his face, on his chin. Drying. “You died. Badly. And I’m going to feel that forever, and you are too, but you can—you can move on. The Force wants you. You can be free, you can be safe, you don’t need to be forgiven because you were the ones hurt. You know what I see? You were all Jedi. You are all Jedi.”  
  
 _Jedi_  
  
 _No_  
  
 _Yes_  
  
 _How can you how are you_  
  
 _Us?_  
  
“Yeah, well.” A one-shouldered shrug, a wince; James must have bruises from the collision with the floor. “I know some things about being alone. And I know you don’t have to be. I said the Force wants you. The universe wants you. You’re alive and the universe is alive and it’s fucking beautiful, have you seen it? Everything out there just waiting for you, beyond these walls. Can I show you?”  
  
 _We’re dead_  
  
 _Show us_  
  
“You’re dead Jedi,” James pointed out, and swiped at some of the blood with his sleeve. “Come on, then. Let me just try this…”  
  
The universe blossomed. No other words. The Force billowing outward in great blue-white light, profusions of beckoning glory. Affirmation and possibilities and promise: other skies, other realms, spaces of existence beyond the earthly binaries of living and dead. Serenity, the kind enrobed in blazing joy.  
  
The ghosts quivered. Yearned forward. Tentative ventures.  
  
James, holding the gateway open, crying again from effort and ecstasy and shared emotion, beckoned gently, “I’m still human, so you’re going to have to hurry up a bit, the Force is making it easier—told you someone wanted you—but I can’t keep this up forever…”  
  
The shadows poured through in a rush. Each one turned into a blue-outlined shape—a Twi’lek girl, an Ithorian boy, a purple-skinned knot of tentacles Michael didn’t recognize—in the last second. Some of them waved. James waved back, winced, waved at the next one.  
  
Near the end, one of them hesitated. _You?_  
  
“Me what? I didn’t know I could do this, so for all I know I’m going right after.”  
  
 _No you stay you be safe_  
  
“Nice of you to say, but I don’t think you can promise that.” James’s face was white under the blood. Michael pounded a hand against the uncaring doorway.  
  
 _I stay_ , decided the shadow, and sat down firmly next to James’s right foot.  
  
“You…what?”  
  
Several of the other wispy bits of obsidian looked at the first one, and then came over and sat down too.  
  
“Ah…” James looked from the portal to the collection of spirits at his side. “I appreciate the gesture, but…if you want to go, go now. I don’t know if I can ever do this again.”  
  
 _What else_  
  
 _What else can we do_  
  
 _Help?_  
  
“Me?”  
  
 _We’re Jedi_  
  
 _You said we were Jedi_  
  
 _Help you_  
  
Two last silken black ribbons dove into light. They glowed blue and rapturous, and vanished. The rest refused to move.  
  
“You’ve got about five seconds,” James said, “I mean it, I’m going to either pass out or throw up on you or possibly, y’know, die…”  
  
The first one, the first one that’d chosen to stay, hopped up right in front of his face and flung out dark streamers in every direction. James, startled by the attack of aggressively caring black-glowing blowfish, fell over. The portal snapped shut.  
  
Michael tried kicking the door. Tried yanking at it with every drop of Force-enchanced strength. Patrick and Ian joined in, all three of them yelling James’s name.  
  
Michael, seeing everything through the link, could feel the rush of dizziness, the disembodied eerie disorientation, the way James’s nose was bleeding anew, red on his shirt and his hand; the empty hollowness where there’d been luminous light, like withdrawal but an infinity worse…  
  
Not empty. Warm. Strength from someplace else. Someone else. Freely given. Shared.  
  
Someone who’d once known, who knew again, how to touch the Force. Untrained and clumsy and young, but healing.  
  
Several someones. Not merely one.  
  
James opened his eyes.  
  
The ghost-echo that’d done most of the talking announced smugly, _Help you!_  
  
“I…guess you did, at that. Thank you.” James pushed himself up on elbows, wobbly but inarguably alive. “That…thank you. I don’t know what to say.”  
  
 _What do we do_  
  
 _What do we do now_  
  
 _Tell us_  
  
 _More help?_  
  
“Oh…all right…so I’m the older brother in this relationship…we’re not saying dad or I might have to rethink this, I’m not old enough to be your dad, you’ve got centuries on me…okay, give me a minute, I need to breathe.”  
  
Michael also needed to breathe. Needed to fling arms around James and never let go. Never.  
  
“You do need something to do,” James decided, giving up on the attempt to get any more vertical for the time being. “For one, you can finish your training, right? You were all students, and I’ve got no clue how that’s going to work when you can’t hold a lightsaber but you _are_ Jedi so we’ll sort it out. And…I think…you might not be able to leave the Academy…I think you _can_ , but you’re bound here, right, so if you go too far…that won’t work too well.”  
  
 _Stay with us_  
  
“You know I can’t. You were in my head. I’ve got orders.”  
  
 _Miss you,_ muttered the biggest one, one of the last to stay, sulkily.  
  
“Yeah, I know, I’ll miss you too. I’ll come back and see you. I promise. Idea, though. You were doing this for centuries, right? Testing potential Jedi Knights?”  
  
A ruffle of discontent ran around the room. The windows rattled their bones. Michael’s skin prickled.  
  
James clarified hastily, “Not like what you were doing. Obviously. But the Academy needs a standard test for apprentices, and you know better than anyone the worst that an apprentice can feel…you got to me, and I have serious shields. If you wanted…we could think of it like a game. Not because you want to hurt anyone—and you won’t—but for fun. Playing with the trainees. Designing the tests. You could work with Patrick and Ian, you saw them in my head, they’re marvelous, you’d love them. And that can be part of your training, too.”  
  
 _Teachers_  
  
 _We could be teachers_  
  
 _Games_  
  
 _Fun?_  
  
 _Mazes tag playtime no one hurt but fun?_  
  
“More or less. You can pretend to be scary, if you want.”  
  
 _Good at scary!_  
  
“Extremely good at scary. I should know.”  
  
The most daring ghost-shadow flickered around James’s hand, windy and insubstantial and worried. _Hurt you sorry_  
  
“Ah, yeah, you did some. I’ll heal.” James flopped backwards onto the floor, knees bent, head resting on dusty once-polished wood. “It’s fine. Hey, you want to hear a really bad joke? Know where hurt people go on Hoth? A Hothpital.”  
  
Spinning merriment. Giddy racing shadows. Up and down walls. A hint of pale sunshine through cracking window-seals.  
  
The ghost-trainee that seemed to be the spokespirit bumped up against James’s arm a second time, thoughtful. _Sorry_  
  
“Oh, no, it’s okay.” Nothing solid to pet, but James’s voice did it anyway. Rolling hillls and Highland heather and scratches behind ears. “We’re okay. I need something to call you, don’t I? You ever hear the stories about Lady Charlotte Xavier and her Merry X-Men?”  
  
 _Heroes?_  
  
“Absolutely heroes. I can’t call you Charlie, ’cause that’s my ship, and that’d be frankly weird, calling you the name of my ship, but…Lady Charlie’s best friend was Sir Erika, the Lost Knight, right? And sometimes Erika did some pretty bad shit—oh, fuck, sorry—ah, you’ve probably heard worse—anyway, Erika did some very terrible things, and hurt a lot of people, but she did those things because she believed she was making the world safer for other people. Not sayin’ she was right, and she had a lot to make up for when she came home, but she did come home, and the way I heard that story, she and Charlie got to be friends again. So I’m thinking you can be an Erika, least until you figure out your own name, what do you think?”  
  
 _Erka!_  
  
James laughed. “Close enough.”  
  
 _Open up?_  
  
“Huh? Oh, the doors.” James draped an arm over his face. Across his eyes. “Sure. Let people in. Well—this is your place, you let people in if you want to talk to them, if you want them in, got it?”  
  
 _You need people_  
  
 _Lonely_  
  
 _Hurting_  
  
“Stop that. ’s like talking to my grandmother, and that’s every kind of uncomfortable, especially if you start trying to set me up with the local cantina-owner’s son because he looks like a nice boy. Which, in fact, he was, not that he wasn’t also terrified of both Gran and me, so, y’know, so much for that. You can let people in, since you _are_ , thanks for that.”  
  
The doors popped open. A rush of air, centuries-stale, musty with past fear and pain and triumph and sweat and ordeal. Crumbling books and disused holocubes and the taste of time.  
  
Michael only had eyes for James. Who was lying on his back with the friendliest shade-memory curled into a ball on his chest and two more around his shins. Three or four others, the ones who’d stayed, perched in splinters of light from peeling window-covers and regarded the newcomers warily.  
  
He inched a foot closer. James didn’t move, not the bent knees or the arm over his eyes. His self-appointed defender sat up and hissed.  
  
Patrick and Ian crowded in, tripping over each other and words. “James? Are you—”  
  
“—all right, and how did you—we didn’t think this space could be—”  
  
“Everyone said it would never be cleansed, and you—”  
  
“I listened,” James said from under the arm. “That’s all.”  
  
Patrick and Ian looked at each other. They were holding hands, Michael realized. The best Heads the Jedi Academy’d ever known, and they looked smaller and younger and in awe next to James.  
  
Who sat up, and then stood up, coaxing miniature shadows off his chest and legs and into the air. “I’m okay. They’re okay too, but they’re going to need some friends, the ones who’re staying around. I told them they could help. They want to.”  
  
“Oh,” Patrick said, “oh, yes, of course, we’d love to meet them…”  
  
Michael didn’t know how to move. How to speak. He stood there next to Ian and Patrick and watched James hold out a hand and introduce the scourge of apprentice nightmares to the Academy Heads; watched Ian inquire with grave compassion how Miss Erika might feel about exploring the rest of the Academy, newly-built wings and unfurling libraries.  
  
James glanced at Michael once, very quickly, when introducing him in turn. Master Fassbender. Excellent with new trainees, anyone needing help settling in, anyone needing a friend.  
  
Michael said all the right words of welcome and kept staring at James. Who had walked into the Dark Room and come out leading children into the light. Who’d told them terrible jokes about hospitals and who moved as if some equally terrible wound kept him from reaching out, raw torn edges shifting and stretching with every breath or transference of weight.  
  
“James,” Ian was saying, “of course there’ll be a ceremony later—if you’d like, only if you’d like—but I think we can all agree that not only did you get through your ordeal, dear boy, but—above and beyond, really, I should think. So we may as well recognize that now.”  
  
Patrick finished, “Jedi Knight James McAvoy, then, how does that sound?”  
  
“Like everything I wanted,” James said.  
  
“Here, we brought your cloak—oh, and your lightsaber—”  
  
A few of the little shadows stirred restlessly at the sight of the weapon. James soothed them with a backwards glance, a caress of fingertips from across the room. “Thank you. I mean for everything. I mean it. The two of you gave me a home.”  
  
Michael said desperately, “Congratulations,” and hated himself. Wasn’t what he’d meant to say.  
  
Blue eyes flicked his direction. Wavered. Came back with more resolute certainty. “Thank you, sir. And—thank you, too. About home—Michael, I—I’m actually really fuckin’ tired right now, if you don’t mind.”  
  
“Oh…no, of course you would…back to our room, or…”  
  
James said, not to Michael but to the ink-splash phantom of Erika hovering worriedly at his shoulder, “I’ve got some things to do, a mission to get ready for—oh, come on, don’t make that face at me, you _were_ in training here too— _yes_ , I’ll come back and see you before I leave. I swear. Right now I have to go, though, so you and everybody stay here and talk to Ian and Patrick for a while?”  
  
“James,” Michael attempted. Broken glass over his tongue. In his throat.  
  
“Take the night,” Patrick said. “Take a few nights. A week. We’ll set up a celebration—nothing big, but maybe your family could make the trip, and your friends here.”  
  
“People will need to know,” James agreed. “Press conferences…the media…”  
  
Patrick raised admonishing eyebrows. “I meant friends.”  
  
And James smiled, crooked and real. A stray bit of Coruscant sunlight found his cheekbone and painted freckles in butter-yellow and white cream. “A week, then.”  
  
“Go rest,” Patrick said, holding his gaze. Michael couldn’t hear the unspoken words, but could very nearly see them, anguish and understanding carried through the Force.  
  
James’s smile got a hairsbreadth wider and more rueful. “I’ll try.”  
  
“Do or do not,” Ian said from the floor, where he’d been gleefully mobbed by insubstantial Force-adept children.  
  
“Am I allowed to tell my Masters to fuck off, now,” James said, but he was laughing. “And stop giving me fatherly advice. I’ll think about it. I am thinking about it. Just give me space, first.”  
  
“Go on,” Ian said. “Jedi Knight.”  
  
James laughed again, very softly, almost to himself, and tipped his head in Michael’s direction. “Come on.”  
  
Out in the hall the air was lighter, less fraught with ancient horror and newfound hope, though no easier to breathe. Michael put one hand on the closest wall just for something to touch. He couldn’t touch James. Not when James was looking at him, looking away from him, like this.  
  
He touched their link, invisibly. It was present but thin; he could tell that James was alive and near him, but everything else’d been pulled so far back he couldn’t find it. No clue how James was feeling, other than overwhelmingly crushingly tired.  
  
“I know you saw that,” James said, gaze landing someplace around Michael’s collarbone. “You were in there. Watching.”  
  
“You were incredible—”  
  
“Don’t.” James did look up. The blood clung to his face where he’d not managed to scrub it off. The dried tear-lines along his cheeks shouldn’t’ve been visible, but were. Salt over freckles. That irrevocable wound. “It hurts too much to hear you think that. Not now.”  
  
“What can I do?”  
  
“I don’t know.” With a lip-lick, an awful fractional shrug. “I knew it’d be rough. Not supposed to be easy, is it, the ordeal.”  
  
“Most people don’t end up cleansing the Academy of the worst blasphemy in existence, either…no one except for you…I think you’re sort of an adoptive parent now, they adore you… _I_ adore you. I love you. Does that help?”  
  
“Some. Imagine the family reunions. So, Gran, I’ve brought formerly murderous Jedi ghost children home for supper, oh, maybe five or six of them, but it’s fine, no need to throw lightning-bolts, we can handle them.”  
  
“We,” Michael said.  
  
“I…did say that, didn’t I.” James dropped his gaze to the floor. The once-expensive imported Bakuran teak evidently provided no answers, because his head came up again. “I don’t know. That’s even worse, isn’t it?—ghost babies, and then your parents with their wonderfully normal restaurant, me and my Gran with witch-blood, paparazzi in the background taking pictures of your sister, and you stuck someplace in the middle trying to say you love me.”  
  
“I _do_.”  
  
“And we’ll make it work, and the ending’ll be full of rainbows and Ewok campfire songs and everybody learning to get along.” Back to scrutinizing the floor, the join where wood met wall, the unhappy dust-bunnies missed by cleaning droids who never came this far down. “I’ll believe it later. I think I can believe it, later.”  
  
Michael took a step forward. “James—”  
  
James held up a hand. Not angry; almost instinctive. A defense mechanism. Between them.  
  
“James,” he whispered again, because that was all he could say.  
  
“I know,” James told him. “I know it wasn’t you in there. I just—I need time. Please.”  
  
He couldn’t breathe. Galaxies collapsing around him. Stars fuzzing in front of his vision. “How—how long—no, never mind, don’t—as long as you need. I’ll be here.”  
  
James’s smile was a frayed ribbon of hope, tattered and carried on a breath. “I know.”  
  
“What they said,” Michael choked out, “what they said, about me—”  
  
“You don’t have to—”  
  
“They’re wrong, they’re fucking wrong, James, I love you, I don’t care what you do or what you share with anyone as long as you come home to me, you’re a Jedi and I’m a Jedi and we help people and you’re a better healer than I am and if you need to heal people—I love you, you amaze me, I love you.” He stopped. Pleaded brokenly, “I mean it. Tell me when you’re ready. I’m here.”  
  
He thought the hope might be less tattered this time. Couldn’t be sure. James ran a hand through his own hair, and Michael’d never seen blue eyes look so devastated, and the devastation reached into his chest and ripped his heart and lungs and spine out with iron hands.  
  
“I’ll let you know.” Gutted, bruised, beautiful: a Jedi Knight, and the other half of Michael’s soul, forever. “I think…I hope…it won’t be long. I just—I need to not look at you right now. Not only you. Anyone. People.” One more hand through the hair; tiny tremors in fingertips. “I know I love you. I just can’t yet. Soon.”  
  
Michael had to nod. No other answer, not if he wanted James to come back, not if he loved James, and he did, he loved James, he would love James forever, no until or unless or limits or boundaries.  
  
James walked away, five steps, countable steps, one-two-three-four-five, and got into the closest lift and didn’t look back. The doors closed. Took Michael’s heart away inside them.  
  
The wall flattened itself coldly against his back. Wood, he knew. Logically shouldn’t feel like death. It did.  
  
The cold didn’t matter. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and tried to remember how to exhale or cry or move, but he couldn’t, not until all his limbs gave way and he ended up sitting on the floor in an abandoned Academy hallway, hugging his knees to his chest and shivering without sound.


	8. with you, always

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A very important conversation, and a happy ending. (And implied future sex involving fun toys.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're done! Thank you all for putting up with my slowness towards the end of this! Apologies, and I love you!

Michael spent the day trying not to think. Trying not to feel.   
  
Not only because emotions hurt. Because he was afraid those emotions would hurt James.   
  
James hadn’t opened up their connection any further, but hadn’t shut it down. Michael could sense him, a feather-light rustle of heartbeat, existence, life. James was here and letting him know that much. He had to be grateful. Couldn’t be anything else.   
  
He tried to hold all his own despair and anguish and loneliness inside. He knew why James needed time. He’d seen those visions, heard those words. He knew that James knew—intellectually, rationally, logically—that the ghosts had been twisting truth, exaggerating pain, making the ordeal exactly that. They both knew.   
  
He also knew that that might not matter. The words had been said. Those words, spoken by a phantom wearing Michael’s face, had sunk home like a blade to the heart. No way around the sword-point.   
  
He knew James wasn’t in the hangar bay—he’d’ve sensed that, if they were close to being in the same space—and he spent several hours tinkering with his own skyhopper, tweaking settings, looking up fuel ratios for improved performance. He couldn’t get too dirty; he’d need to shower, and he might run into James somewhere near their quarters.   
  
Likely a futile hope. James wouldn’t’ve stayed. Not in a living space where every pillow, every dish-towel, every breath must remind him of Michael.   
  
The night before, they’d made love. He’d kissed exotic-spice freckles, nutmeg and cream, and kissed James, and they’d moved together.    
  
He wanted to cry, but didn’t, and he didn’t know why he didn’t.   
  
We’ll be Jedi, James had said in that chamber. Whatever else happens, whether or not he hates me, we’ll be who we are.   
  
James was more of a hero than Michael ever could be. He wasn’t sure he’d’ve had the strength to say the words. Yes, he _could_ live without James. It’d be like living with his heart torn out of his body, and he’d never be the same again, but he would go back to teaching, he’d have a life.   
  
But he didn’t think he could’ve said it out loud. He couldn’t say it even to himself. No. Please no.   
  
James had also said: I know I love you. You love me. I hope it won’t be long.   
  
Hope. Michael polished the hood of his skyhopper for the tenth time. Clung to that idea. The space-worn metal shone tranquilly up at him as if it believed the word.   
  
Mid-afternoon, his stomach—which plainly hadn’t got the end-of-the-world tragic message—announced its emptiness. Reluctantly he wandered in search of the dining hall, and prayed to the Force that it’d be deserted.   
  
The Force, as usual, granted about half a prayer. Certainly the place wasn’t crowded, but several of James’s fellow-apprentice friends were present, chattering in small groups, throwing glances at the door. Michael, edging in, wondered whether they’d been hoping for James; they spotted him immediately and flocked over.   
  
“Congratulations—”   
  
“How is he? Was it awful?”   
  
“Did he really save fifty ghost Jedi?”   
  
“And they’re going to be teachers here? Is that legal?”   
  
“Can he actually talk to the living Force, because no one in the Archives has been able to do that since—”   
  
Very quietly, from young Nick, the boy who’d spent afternoons tutoring James in Order history upon James’s belated Academy arrival: “He’s hurt, isn’t he? How bad was it in there?”   
  
Michael scrubbed a hand through his hair, sat down, put both hands over his face for a few seconds. The apprentices conferred. A mug of steaming caf appeared at his elbow. An roast nerf sandwich. A multitude of expectant but waiting eyes.   
  
He picked up the mug in both hands, staring into black heat. The steam wafted up and tried to reassure his eyebrows. “Not fifty. Well, maybe. I don’t know how many he sent on. Six of them stayed. For him.” To his mild horror, his voice cracked over the last two words.   
  
Nick swung a leg over the chair beside him. “What happened? Master. Sorry.”   
  
“He saved them, and they saved him.” The heat was flowing from the mug into his hands. Thawing them out, nerve by nerve. “He would’ve died. Not because of the ordeal. He was done. He could have walked out. He saw what we couldn’t. That they were people. Children. He couldn’t leave them there.”   
  
One of the tiger-striped Cathar apprentices, curled on the end of the table, asked meekly, “But he was hurt?” and his voice carried a yowl of grief in the question.   
  
“He was…” Michael sighed. Eyed the assembled group, apprentices of all years and backgrounds. They loved James. And he’d been James’s Master. “He’s all right. He’s just…the point of ordeals—which you’ll get, this year, some of you—is to make you confront yourself. What you are. What you could be. But James…the thing is, the rest of us would just sort of face ourselves, in there…he kind of…well, he felt all of them. The children. The ones who died.”   
  
This statement was met with horrified silence. All of the group knew precisely how good James was at feeling.    
  
Nick murmured, shocked and nearly inaudible, “Makes me glad I’m in training as the next Archivist…”   
  
“He said he needs time,” Michael said, half to himself and half to them. One of them—Jen, a girl who’d been in one of his earliest classes—patted him on the shoulder. He wondered how much James had told them about him, and he wondered when they’d learned to get so familiar with one of their Academy Masters, but the contact felt nice, and he didn’t have the energy to protest the attention.   
  
Jen promised, nudging the sandwich his direction, “He loves you. You should’ve heard him talk about you during breaks. We totally asked for details, too, ’cause the two of you together is seriously hot, but he said you were being all noble about it, and he loved that, and he loves you.” The assembled apprentices nodded as one. “If he said he needs time, that’s what he means.”   
  
“I know,” Michael grumbled back, and took a bite of the sandwich so they’d stop pointedly levitating it. Rather to his surprise, the first bite tasted wonderful, and he discovered that maybe he was ravenous, and then he was full, and that felt oddly better. Like the world might be recoverable after all. Hope. Yes. Maybe, yes.   
  
He looked up at them over crumbs, remembered that he was supposed to be the instructor, and demanded, “Don’t you all have class? And…y’know, thank you. From us both.”   
  
“I have a free day,” Nick said, unrepentant.   
  
“I don’t,” Jen said, “but I’ll be listening in, because Ellen—“” A dark-haired pale-skinned Thyferran girl waved their direction. “—is super-awesome with mind-links. Um. Sorry.”   
  
“I think I should be pretending, as a teacher,” Michael said to no one in particular, “that I never heard that.”    
  
Jen patted his arm again. “You’re only, what, a year out of the Academy yourself. Master.”   
  
“You might want to go home,” Nick said, and they all glanced at him. He shrugged. “Just a feeling.”   
  
Home. Where he’d kissed James, where James had kissed him. Where James had fallen asleep on his sofa in the wake of starship-rescuing backlash; where they’d woken up tangled into each other only that morning.   
  
He thought maybe he could go home. Even if James wasn’t there, those memories would be. They were good ones. They felt right.   
  
He became, slowly, aware of the smudge of ship-polish on his left thumb. Quite possibly in his hair as well. Oh, hells.   
  
“Maybe I should shower?”   
  
“Maybe,” Nick agreed. The corners of his mouth were twitching. Michael considered the fact that the boy was very probably the next up in terms of exams and graduation, and closer to his own age than he’d previously realized. Growing up. They all were. And they knew how it felt to care about a friend.   
  
“If anyone asks,” he said, getting up, “I don’t know anything about anyone eavesdropping. When I know something…when anything changes…well, you’ll sort of probably know. Um. You know.”   
  
“Yeah,” put in the other Cathar apprentice, happily, “we were much enjoying last night, did you try the thing with the ice-pops, or—” At this point her friend nipped at her tail, and they devolved into a tumbling ball of feline fur and play-fighting claws.    
  
Michael resolutely did _not_ blush in front of the horde of apprentices. Just gulped down the rest of the welcome caffeine, straightened his shoulders, and said, “Not yet.” Various hands and paws and tentacles applauded.   
  
Not yet. He hoped. Oh, he hoped. Please.   
  
He got into the lift smiling, though the boost to his mood ebbed somewhat during the ride. The food and the optimism had helped, but there was no escaping the fact that the link’d stayed silent, that James wouldn’t be waiting when Michael came through the door.   
  
Every step down the hall felt like a battle. Like a minor victory over hopelessness. He’d come home and he’d give James time and he’d be content with that. For James.    
  
The featureless walls coaxed him on. Out of their blankness and into a space full of cozy blankets and starfruit and James’s ridiculous honey-stick obsession. He caught himself smiling again.   
  
He reached out a hand to the door. It opened.   
  
He stared at it. He’d not done that. Unless he was losing his mind, and his Force control, in the absence of his other half.   
  
He took a step in, tentatively. If he was losing his mind, he was probably better off being tentative about things.   
  
His quarters smelled like baked goods. Like sunberry cream-cakes and vweliu-nut bread. He couldn’t recall whether going insane from emotional grief included olfactory hallucinations, but maybe it did. Why not.   
  
Except there was a why not. Because there was James, wandering out from the bedroom, stretching, hair post-shower rumpled and eyes incredibly blue.   
  
There was James. In his quarters. Wearing, a distant part of Michael’s heart recorded, one of Michael’s spare robes and nothing else. The robe was too big for him. Falling off a shoulder. Showing freckles.   
  
There was James and Michael couldn’t breathe. Thought he might in fact pass out. Sparkles at the edge of his vision. Relief and disbelief and concern and above all love warring for supremacy.   
  
“Hey,” James said, right in front of him now, hands on Michael’s shoulders, and when had that happened, and how? “Sorry, sorry, you’re fine, we’re fine, just look at me, just breathe, okay? Here, sit down.”   
  
On the sofa. James’s hands in his. James’s eyes intent and affectionate and kind. Link still muted. Michael tried to speak, had no words, tried again, continued to fail. Managed, “You’re here…”   
  
“I’m here.” James looked at their hands. “I said I needed time. Maybe I do. But I want you. I love you. I wanted to be here.”   
  
“I love you,” Michael told him, heart full and overflowing, spilling into words. “I want you, too. I want—whatever you want, James, just tell me what you need.”   
  
“What I need…” James met his gaze. Smiled, coruscatingly bright. Hesitance and hope and courage all at once. “I need you. I know that. My anchor.”   
  
“Always,” Michael got out, “always—” and put a hand out, finding his face, his hair, his cheek. Pale, but washed free of blood, trauma cleansed from the surface; weary, but real. James tipped his head into the caress, eyelashes sweeping down and up. “Feels nice. You, touching me.”   
  
“Always to that too, then…are you…is that a headache?” He wouldn’t ask for James to open up the link. He _was_ anxious. He knew James could handle backlash. “Can I help? If you want.”   
  
“It is, and you are.” James turned his head, pressed a kiss to Michael’s palm. “I spent the first two hours finally learning how other Jedi feel after major Star-Destroyer lifting. I don’t think I like the whole headsplitting migraine part; you can keep it. But it’s getting better. Natural defenses. Bouncing back. Excessively bouncy. I told you.”   
  
“You did.” He squeezed James’s other hand. “I’m glad you’re okay.” I wish I’d been there, I know why you didn’t want me there, I’m sorry, I’ll be here now for the end of it if you’ll let me. Unsaid, but he meant it.   
  
“About that,” James said, looking at their hands again. “I’ll—I can open it up again. Us. I want to. You don’t know how much I fuckin’ want to. But I was thinking, and I want to talk, and—and this is the only way I can be sure. I still can’t be sure, but I’m trying.”   
  
“You think you’re influencing me.”   
  
“They weren’t wrong. The ghost-trainees. About me.” James bit his lip. Hard. “I could be. I think I’m not, but—I might not know. That’s one. Of the things you need to know.”   
  
Michael almost snapped _I know everything I need to know,_ but this was important, this was momentous, this was the difference between James staying in his arms or walking out the door, so he met those solemn eyes and nodded.   
  
This earned a half-smile. The right answer, then. James went on, gaze steady and serious and braced for some expected impact, “Okay, so…also they were right about more. I’ve not slept with anyone at the Academy. I wouldn’t—do that. But someday…there might be someone who needs a—a companion, for a night. And I love you, I’d never want to hurt you, but sometimes if there’s pain, if I can help…it’ll hurt if I don’t. I don’t know if it’ll happen. Might not. But it might. We’ll be on a lot of worlds, as Jedi Ambassadors.”   
  
Michael took a deep breath. Let it out. At least two gut reactions jumped onto his tongue— _no, I don’t care, I love you, any way I can have you_ chased by the burning awareness of his own conceptions about fidelity and possessiveness and protectiveness—but he shoved them down and forced himself to process responses and honesty and reasonable commitments, instead.   
  
He said, working it out, holding James’s hand, “I won’t love seeing you leave to spend a night with someone else. I never will. But…you were right, before. You said we were Jedi. And I made you quote that terrible textbook, once…we help people. We fix what’s broken, what’s hurting in the galaxy. And you know that better than anyone. So…”   
  
“So,” James breathed, watching his face, eyes like the tremulous beginnings of dawn.   
  
“So if you need to…if it’s once in a while, maybe…if I know you’re coming home to me…” He leaned in. Not quite a kiss; close enough to be one, though. “I’d already decided that. After Steve showed up to yell at me for being oblivious. I thought…I just wanted you. And that’s part of you. So yes.”   
  
“Yes,” James repeated, gazing at him like Michael was the rarest treasure in the universe. “I love you. About the first part, though.”   
  
“You influencing me?” He raised an eyebrow, copying one of James’s gestures. “Some of us’re also empaths over here, you know. Not you, but I’m not bad, either. You know that. You said it. Why me, for you.”   
  
And James, who’d evidently forgotten or talked himself out of considering this, sat there surprised.   
  
Michael, for good measure, added, “I might not be able to contain you if you decide to turn completely evil, which you won’t, but I _will_ notice if I’m having feelings that aren’t mine, and trust me, I’ve had a lot of feelings for you all along.”   
  
“Oh,” James said, with the tone of someone rediscovering a key that’d been in plain sight all along, and putting it into the lock on the door.   
  
“I love you. Was that it?” He ran fingers through James’s hair, loving the softness, feeling the metaphorical key turn. “Still here.”   
  
“One more.” James nibbled at that lip again. Beneath their shared weight, sofa cushions fluffed up temptingly. Optimistic. “About me, about what we’re doing…Ian and Patrick want me to be open about, well, me. Where I come from. And I do have great-aunts who killed people and rode rancors and were every fuckin’ nightmare you can think of when you think of the witches of Dathomir. And people will say…what people say…when we show up as Jedi Ambassadors. I can handle it; that’s part of it, changing the definition of Jedi and witch, together…”   
  
“You can handle anything.”   
  
“Thank you for believing that. I meant, whatever they say about me, they’ll say worse about you. For loving me.” Those words tolled leaden bells in the air, dour and incontrovertible and heavy. They both heard the weight.    
  
James’s eyes found his, but left and slid away, down to a couch-arm, a pillow-corner.   
  
“Well,” Michael said, quiet and calm and resolute, and ran a thumb over James’s cheekbone, finding new freckles, “let them.”   
  
James looked up, startled. The fate of the universe hung suspended in the balance.   
  
And joy flooded through the space between them. Crescendos of love and astonishment and _yes_ _yes_ _yes_ _this,_ blue flame and shimmering elation and limitless cascading possibility. Wide-open doors.   
  
Michael found himself laughing with exhilaration, with James’s amazed sudden euphoria, with the ludicrous stupendous incandescent beauty of the future and the feeling of freckled skin beneath his hands.   
  
“Let them,” James said, laughing along, too much exultation to contain. “Seriously, sir…holodrama heroics, perfect bad lines, and I love it, I love you—”   
  
Michael yanked him closer, James tumbled into his lap, touching everywhere now, robe coming loose and puddling on the floor. James tried to sit up and kiss him and shake off the last clinging sleeve; Michael tried to help, hands and limbs going everywhere.   
  
“I love you,” James said again, and thought it for emphasis, lying sprawled out under him on their sofa in _their_ quarters. _So fucking much. If I didn’t say._   
  
“You and your fucking mouth,” Michael said between kisses, “and cream-cakes and nut-bread…”   
  
“I needed to keep my hands busy while I was sorting myself out.” James wrapped a leg around his waist. “Knew you wouldn’t mind. I can feed you in bed, later.”   
  
“I might like feeding _you._ ” That image, and the accompanying wave of tenderness, made James blush ferociously. Michael kissed his nose—they’d have to work on that, his ex-apprentice and fellow Jedi Knight and unmatchable healer-empath accepting the idea of being taken care of without attempts to reciprocate, but not right now, right now was about new sunrises and the exultant spin of galaxies in motion—and inquired, stray thought kicking the back of his mind, “James?”   
  
“That’d better be a question about putting fingers certain places, sir—sorry! Habit! But you like it.”   
  
“So do you. And yes, but…you said you weren’t sleeping with anyone here…but…” He fished that memory up into clearer light: James turning up for class with a limp and exhaustion and that bewildering twinge of satisfaction-dissatisfaction, sated but unfulfilled.   
  
James laughed again. Not ashamed or embarrassed, not about this, evidently. The pocket of Michael’s heart that’d been holding on to weeks of apprehension shuddered toward reprieve at last.   
  
“About that,” James said, putting hands on his shoulders, drawing him down into a luxurious leisurely kiss, _I do get frustrated sometimes. Feeling other people having all the sex from a distance—not listening in! but that can get loud, if I’m tired and my shields aren’t—and NOT having sex over here, because I’m behaving, you know, being good…_   
  
“Very good,” Michael concurred, with a nip of teeth and a wordless murmur of pure praise and pride. James moaned softly, hips lifting into his.    
  
_ What I’m trying to say is…do that again!…I’ve got quite a lot of toys. They weren’t you, but they did help.  _ “Might prefer your help, though, from now on, if you’re willing.”    
  
And those images spilled into Michael’s thoughts like kaleidoscopic debauchery, wanton and slick and sensual: James naked in his own bed, James dizzy and drunk on lust and longing, James sliding fingers and buzzing toys up inside himself while gripping his flushed cock, James coming and coming over and over again, mouth a lovely wide _oh!_ of desire and back arched off the sheets, James thinking of Michael’s hands and eyes and smile, imagining…   
  
“James,” Michael said, breathless, wanting, _having,_ now, and in love.   
  
“Mmm…yes, sir?”   
  
“I want you,” Michael told him, “forever, saving the universe and adopting five hundred Jedi ghost-babies if you want, I love you, and also I want you to show me all of your toys.”


End file.
